Executive Summary
HIV criminalization refers to laws that impose criminal penalties for conduct based on an individual’s HIV-positive status. While many of these laws were enacted during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, advances in HIV prevention and treatment have significantly reduced the risk of transmission and transformed HIV into a manageable chronic condition for many people. Nevertheless, HIV-related criminal laws remain in effect in many jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania.
HIV criminalization through HIV-related criminal laws in Pennsylvania began in the mid-1990s. These laws punish certain conduct by people living with HIV, such as exposing others to bodily fluids or waste. In 2022, Pennsylvania amended its HIV-specific bodily-fluid exposure offenses, “Assault by Prisoner” and “Assault by Life Prisoner,” that apply to incarcerated people. It removed explicit references to HIV and incorporated the laws into a broader communicable disease framework. It also specified that the type of bodily fluid exposure must be one that “can transmit the communicable disease.” The same year, Pennsylvania’s legislature created a new offense, “Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer,” which expanded criminalization of communicable disease-related bodily fluid exposure beyond incarceration settings. Although these reforms removed HIV-specific language from these offenses, Pennsylvania’s new legal framework continued to criminalize certain conduct involving HIV-related bodily-fluid exposure.
This report examines the impact of legislative reforms on HIV criminalization in Pennsylvania, with particular attention to bodily-fluid exposure offenses, including Assault by Prisoner, Assault by Life Prisoner, and Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer.
Key Findings
- Replacing HIV-specific language with broader references to communicable diseases and specifying that the method of exposure must be one capable of transmitting the communicable disease had little effect on the enforcement of Pennsylvania’s Assault by Prisoner and Assault by Life Prisoner offenses.
- The enactment of a new offense, Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer, resulted in a substantial increase in criminalization and enforcement over time.
- Comparing the two statutes for which we have the most comparable data, after 2022, there were a total of 21 Assault by Prisoner bodily fluid exposure cases involving communicable diseases in 2023 and 2024, compared with 80 Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer cases, an almost four-to-one ratio.
Although we were unable to identify the specific alleged disease exposure in the available data, removing the explicit reference to HIV and expanding the scope of covered diseases did not appear to meaningfully alter enforcement patterns, whereas creating a new criminal offense significantly increased enforcement. Overall, Pennsylvania’s HIV-related legislative reforms have resulted in a marked increase in the criminalization of people with communicable diseases in the state, as measured by the number of new criminal cases filed.