商品簡介
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 concepts and tools of public health that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening 150 years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemicua plague upon our body politic.
Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and researcher, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx. He compares mass incarceration to other well-recognized epidemics using basic public health conceptsu"prevalence and incidence," "outbreaks," "contagion," "transmission," and "potential years of life lost." He argues that imprisonmentuoriginally conceived as a response to individuals' crimesuhas 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 and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a totally novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America.
作者簡介
Ernest Drucker is a scholar in residence and senior research associate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Drucker directed a drug addiction treatment and AIDS research program in the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx from 1970 to 1990. He is the editor in chief of the international Harm Reduction Journal, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Global Health, and a former Soros Justice Fellow. He lives in New York City.
