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

(Paperback)

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Called a towering achievement' by Ira Glasser and 'the clearest and most intelligible case for a re-evaluation of how we view incarceration' by Spectrum Culture, A Plague of Prisons takes the same tools of public health that have tracked flu and AIDS epidemics to make the case that America's level of imprisonment has become an epidemic. Drucker passionately argues that imprisonment has become 'mass incarceration': a destabilising force, a plague upon the body politic, that undermines the communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.'

Reviews

"With voluminous data and meticulous analysis, [Drucker] persuasively demonstrates in his provocative new book that the unprecedented surge in incarceration in recent decades is a social catastrophe on the scale of the worst global epidemics."
-Michelle Alexander, The Washington Post

"How did America's addiction to prisons and mass incarceration get its start and how did it spread from state to state Of the many attempts to answer this question, none make as much sense as the explanation found in [this] book." Philadelphia Inquirer

"Drucker uses the tools of his trade to examine the laws and their consequences...Treating drug addiction as a public-health problem rather than a crime to be punished would go a long way towards making America's poor and minority communities stabler and better."
The Economist

"Wonderfully written and packed with insight."
Todd Clear, dean of the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice

Author Bio

Ernest Drucker is a scholar in residence and senior research associate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine and adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He lives in New York City.