Here is an example of where several lives could have been saved. Locking him up afterwards doesn't help his victims.
HIV: Criminal Intent
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0448/041201_news_hiv.php
Anthony Whitfield was recently convicted in Olympia in one of the nation's worst HIV assault cases. But his prosecution raises serious questions about who is being charged with spreading the AIDS virus and reveals the problems of trying to police private behavior for the public good.
Almost three weeks from now in Olympia, on Tuesday, Dec. 21, Anthony Whitfield, 32, will be sentenced on 17 counts of first-degree assault, the most for anyone in recent state history. His crime: having unprotected sex with 17 different women while knowing he was HIV-positive. Whitfield, an unemployed methamphetamine addict, spent the last several years bouncing around among girlfriends, marrying one, having children with two others, maintaining multiple "long-term" relationships, and having a slew of shorter ones. Though he was informed he was HIV-positive in 1992, he never told his partners, in some instances outright lied about his condition, and often refused to wear condoms. Five of the women have since tested positive for HIV, and one has AIDS. After a two-week trial before a Thurston County judge last month, Whitfield was found guilty on all assault counts.
From the article I linked in my post 91:
"In Seattle, where the bulk of HIV cases involve gay men, Public Health has issued just seven cease-and-desist orders related to dangerous HIV behavior in the last 10 years, reports Dr. Wood. His agency has never had to take the next step of incarcerating someone or transferring the case to law enforcement because he never heard of those individuals again; he suspects the subjects "either get smart, leave town, or become more clandestine." He can't recall coming across anyone in the Seattle area like Whitfield, who appeared to be the source for multiple HIV infections.
But that may speak more to the difficulty in tracing the labyrinthine paths of gay sex than it does to the actual existence of such perpetrators. As Wood points out, some gay men have so much anonymous sex that it's nearly impossible to track down any particular source of infection. "They don't even know the name [of their partners], let alone the address," he says. "Very few places in the country are able to get very far with gay male contacts." Since months or even years may pass before a person learns of their infection—during which time a gay man may have dozens or hundreds of sex partners—it becomes highly unlikely that they will know who infected them, let alone have any grounds for complaint.
The privacy rules and protections that govern HIV also make it hard to uncover who might be exposing whom. Wood notes that 70 percent of the gay men who get tested at King County clinics do so anonymously. They are only identified by name once they seek treatment. And their partners generally remain unknown to Public Health as well. Even if an HIV-positive man does provide the names of some prior sex partners, those records have to be destroyed, per Washington law, after 90 days. "That's an exceptional feature of the way HIV is handled," says Wood. "With all other STDs [sexually transmitted diseases], partner records are kept indefinitely." Once records are destroyed, obviously, it's impossible to discover if one particular name is showing up regularly on the partner lists of men who become infected."