Therapeutic communities: AIDS/HIV risk and harm reduction

The limited survey data available suggest that therapeutic communities have increasingly organized themselves to develop HIV prevention programs and to integrate HIV-infected and AIDS clients into the treatment community while providing specialized program as necessary. Nonetheless, there remains a need for a comprehensive survey of the response of therapeutic communities to AIDS and the risk of HIV infection. There is need as well for studies that can build on findings linking retention in the therapeutic community to strategies that focus on clients' motivation or readiness for treatment. In addition, therapeutic community programs can ally with outreach programs both to provide priority admission to seropositive clients, women with children, adolescents, and criminal justice clients, and to provide harm reduction services to those unwilling to enter treatment while also taking incremental steps to engage those clients in ever increasing behavior change initiatives.