A Plague of PrisonsA Plague of Prisons
the Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America
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Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, , All copies in use.Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, , All copies in use. Offered in 0 more formatsWhen Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: prevalence and incidence,” outbreaks,” contagion,” transmission,” and potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Drucker (criminal justice, City U. of New York, and epidemiology, Columbia U.) applies public health concepts to compare the structure of modern incarceration systems to epidemics from the past. He describes two classic epidemics--cholera in nineteenth-century London and AIDS in twentieth-century New York--to show how the concept and tools of epidemiology work, and explains the anatomy of a major epidemic; the start of mass incarceration in New York State; how the rates of imprisoned people in recent decades show the features of plagues from previous centuries; the impact of incarceration on individuals, their children, and families; and how imprisonment has become a social issue requiring a public health approach. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: ?prevalence and incidence,” ?outbreaks,” ?contagion,” ?transmission,” and ?potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: “prevalence and incidence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” and “potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals' crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: prevalence and incidence,” outbreaks,” contagion,” transmission,” and potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Drucker (criminal justice, City U. of New York, and epidemiology, Columbia U.) applies public health concepts to compare the structure of modern incarceration systems to epidemics from the past. He describes two classic epidemics--cholera in nineteenth-century London and AIDS in twentieth-century New York--to show how the concept and tools of epidemiology work, and explains the anatomy of a major epidemic; the start of mass incarceration in New York State; how the rates of imprisoned people in recent decades show the features of plagues from previous centuries; the impact of incarceration on individuals, their children, and families; and how imprisonment has become a social issue requiring a public health approach. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: ?prevalence and incidence,” ?outbreaks,” ?contagion,” ?transmission,” and ?potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. He
compares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: “prevalence and incidence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” and “potential years of life lost.”
He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals' crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.
Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
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