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

A paradigm-shifting look at our criminal justice system that sees prisons as the problem, not the solution.
Ernie Drucker has long been a leader in new ways of thinking about issues of crime and drugs.  He’s helped
us to imagine a true public health approach to these problems.
—Marc MauEr, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project

During a fatal outbreak of cholera in nineteenth-century London, local physician Dr. John Snow mapped the
spread of the disease and traced it to a single water pump in Soho, founding the discipline of epidemiology.
Snow demonstrated that for all disease outbreaks, social and environmental forces were behind the disaster.
From then on, epidemiology has been the science that has tracked the paths of AIDS, the flu, tuberculosis,
and other major epidemics of the past 150 years. Now, in A Plague of Prisons, renowned epidemiologist
Ernest Drucker uses the science of public health to track one of the biggest and most well-hidden epidemics
of our time: mass incarceration.

Using his field experience treating drug addiction and studying AIDS in some of the poorest districts in the
South Bronx, Drucker applies basic public health concepts to compare the structure of our modern
incarceration system—which has systematically imprisoned unprecedented numbers of men and women—to
well-recognized epidemics from the past. First outlining the underlying anatomy of any major epidemic,
Drucker shows how the staggering rates of imprisoned individuals in recent decades demonstrate the chronic
and self-perpetuating features of plagues of previous centuries. Seen through this lens, he argues that
imprisonment has become “mass incarceration,” and further, that mass incarceration is no longer a response
to individuals’ crimes, but rather a rampant social issue. Drucker shows how today’s norm of mass
incarceration has damaged the ecology of America’s most disadvantaged and crime-ridden neighborhoods by
fostering contagion.

Urging us to take collective responsibility for the effects of our current practices and policies, this paradigm-
shifting study of criminal justice arms the public with a new way of understanding crime and punishment.
Offering concrete solutions for “primary prevention,” A Plague of Prisons lays the groundwork for a much
needed antidote to a grave societal ill.

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 is an NIH funded researcher, editor-in-chief of the
international Harm Reduction Journal, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Global Health, and a Soros Justice
Fellow. He is also a founder and former chairman of Doctors of the World/USA. He lives in New York City.

The New Press

Pub Date: Fall 2011
Format: hardcover
Trim: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 240 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59558-497-7