Sex Slave Claim Fails, Sunday Mail, August 31, 1997.

A FORMER Illinois prisoner has failed to obtain damages against prison officials he claimed allowed him to be used as a "sex slave" and to contract AIDS while serving a 10-year sentence for burglary and auto theft.

No US prisoner has ever obtained damages for getting AIDS in jail. Michael Blucker, 28, claimed he was kept in virtual sexual slavery by gang members who used him as a prostitute and sold him to other inmates for coffee and cigarettes.

Stop Prison Rape, a Los Angeles based organisation, claims that every year up to 300,000 prisoners are raped out of a US prison population of just over a million.

Blucker's lawyer, Joseph Condon, had earlier told the jury: "The facts are horrid. Imagine what it's like for a 24-year-old skinny white boy to endure it."

Prison activists want compulsory testing of inmates for AIDS.

Blucker said he complained about the rapes but nothing was done. Prison officials claim Blucker exchanged sex for drugs.