Teaching Abstinence to Prevent AIDS

In your article about the proposed distribution of condoms in city jails (“City Has No Plans to Implement AIDS Condom Policy in Jail,” Metro, Oct. 24), a state employee is quoted as saying: “Sex in the prisons is illegal.” The willful commission of illegal acts is the reason that people are put in jail, and the fact that these acts are illegal obviously did not stop their perpetrators from committing them in the first place.

It’s a well-known fact: Men behind bars, deprived of female companionship for any period of time, long or short, often turn to their own for alternative gratification. There should be a condom dispenser on the wall of every cell in every jail and prison--city, county, state and federal.

Indeed, yesterday would have been too soon to have installed them.

STEVEN M. MOORE, Pomona