prisons and AIDS rates

Rucker Johnson and Steven Raphael (Berkeley) show that differences in male incarceration rates can explain much of the difference in acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) between different demographic segments in the U.S. From the abstract:

[They] find strong effects of male incarceration rates on male and female AIDS rates. ... The results reveal that higher incarceration rates among black males over this period [1982-96] explain the lion's share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection among women.

The paper was recently published in the Journal of Law and Economics. Download it here or here.