Facing a plague the government met with silence, ACT UP made arrest its instrument: Wall Street 1987; the FDA seizure of 1988 that forced the drug-approval system open; "Stop the Church" at St. Patrick's in 1989, 111 arrests; the CDC, NIH, and the 1992 ashes action at the White House fence. Across a decade, AIDS activists absorbed thousands of arrests — ACT UP chapters treated jail support and "arrest-ready" affinity groups as core infrastructure — in the most sustained health-justice civil disobedience in American history.

The campaign's targets included the prisons themselves, where people with HIV were segregated and left to die untreated: ACT UP's prison committees, with the inside organizing of prisoners like the ACE women of Bedford Hills and the political prisoners of the resistance-conspiracy generation, forced the first HIV care behind bars. The movement lost a generation and changed medicine; its arrestees changed what protest could demand.