Voluntary AIDS Tests of Inmates to Be Implemented : Health: Privacy is promised, and positive results would not be revealed until after the person had gotten out of jail.

Ventura County health and law enforcement officials said Monday that they plan to phase in voluntary AIDS testing and expand current AIDS education programs for county inmates beginning about June 20.

But officials said they do not plan to reveal test results to inmates who test positive for the AIDS virus until after they get out of jail, even though such inmates could infect other prisoners.

“While they’re in jail there’s not to be any sex activity or drug use; it’s against jail policies,” said Bill Weinerth, coordinator of the County Department of Public Health’s outreach program. “We hope that people will act responsibly, but we’re dealing with a population that by their very presence there has shown that they act irresponsibly.”

Currently, AIDS testing is done only by court order when the inmate has put himself or a victim at risk, said Lt. Bruce McDowell, an administrator in the custody division of the Sheriff’s Department.

In the new program, health department workers will take blood samples from inmates serving the final 30 days of their terms who volunteer to be tested, he said.

The samples are to be tested for the AIDS virus and assigned numbers to assure inmates’ privacy, with results to be known to authorities within two weeks. But inmates who are tested will learn of the results only after being released, McDowell said.

The Ventura County program will be a departure from that in Los Angeles County, where inmates can have AIDS tests on request and learn the results within seven days, regardless of their release dates, spokesman Fidel Gonzales said.

McDowell said the delay in releasing test results to Ventura County inmates is meant to protect AIDS-positive prisoners from despair and from discrimination by other inmates.

“I don’t want inmates to hear that kind of news while they’re in here if they can help it,” McDowell said Monday. “There’s a lot of mistrust just in the general community . . . and those types of biases and prejudices are magnified in a jail facility.”

Weinerth said the program’s planners struggled with whether they should notify infected prisoners so that they do not unwittingly spread the virus. But, he said, they came to the conclusion that inmates’ right to privacy must be protected.

The only AIDS education now offered in the jail system is to women inmates at the Sheriff’s Honor Farm in Ojai, where classes are geared toward prostitutes and intravenous drug users.

Authorities plan to expand the education program beginning with the Rose Valley work camp and extend it as soon as possible to the honor farm and to the County Jail in Ventura, Weinerth said.

Weinerth said the AIDS classes will give inmates standard advice about how to protect themselves from the deadly virus--use condoms during sex and avoid sharing needles, or at least clean the needles with bleach before injecting intravenous drugs.

The advice will be meant for when inmates return to the outside world, officials said, since syringes and condoms will not be given to prisoners.

“We recognize that there’s an IV drug-using community, that’s a fact of life,” Weinerth said. “We don’t condone it. We wish that all of the IV drug users would make a commitment in getting off drugs and . . . getting their lives together.”

Although the testing and classes are voluntary, the Public Health Department will distribute AIDS information pamphlets to every departing inmate, McDowell said.