A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America

Criminologists and physicians have long believed that crime control and the regulation of health go hand in hand, applying models from one field to the other. In this short, impassioned book the epidemiologist Ernest Drucker turns the traditional logic on its head. Rather than using public health models to contain the spread of crime, Drucker argues that prisons and American drug policy since the 1970s have become the real danger to the nation's well-being. To sensationalize crack epidemics or attendant crime waves is to miss the point, he suggests, because we have effective tools to manage drug addiction. Instead, the disease we must quarantine, the toxic agent we must control, is the prison itself. Drucker suggests that what he calls interdisciplinary social epidemiology can offer a new paradigm for assessing the impact of mass incarceration. Early chapters on the sinking of the Titanic, on London cholera outbreaks and public health responses, and on hiv/aids (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) illustrate basic epidemiological method—mapping outbreaks, tracing vectors, identifying the demography of the afflicted—in the interest of preventing disease transmission.