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The public health expert and prison reform activist offers “meticulous analysis” on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration (The Washington Post).
An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals, has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that damages the very social structures that prevent crime.
Drucker tracks the phenomenon of mass incarceration using basic public health concepts—“incidence and prevalence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” The resulting analysis demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America.
“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.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals, has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that damages the very social structures that prevent crime.
Drucker tracks the phenomenon of mass incarceration using basic public health concepts—“incidence and prevalence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” The resulting analysis demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America.
“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.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Price: $19.99
Pages: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Imprint: The New Press
Publication Date:
28 May 2013
Trim Size: 8.25 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781595588791
Format: Paperback
"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
-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
Ernest Drucker (1940–2025) was a professor of Global Public Health at New York University’s College of Global Public Health. He was the author of A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America and editor of Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health (both published by The New Press). Drucker was a founder of the International Harm Reduction Association, founding editor of Harm Reduction Journal, former chairman of Doctors of the World/USA, and a Soros Justice Fellow of the Open Society Foundation.