A plague of prisons : the epidemiology of mass incarceration in America / Ernest Drucker.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

An epidemiological riddle -- Cholera in London : the ghost maps of Dr. Snow -- AIDS : the epidemiology of a new disease -- A different kind of epidemic -- Anatomy of an outbreak : New York's Rockefeller drug laws and the prison pump -- Orders of magnitude : the scale of mass incarceration -- A self-sustaining epidemic -- Chronic incapacitation : the long tail of mass incarceration -- The contagion of punishment : collateral damage to children and families of prisoners -- Ending mass incarceration : a public health model.

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. Ernest Drucker's A Plague of Prisons takes the same concepts and tools of public health that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS to make the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic. Drucker passionately argues that imprisonment?originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals?has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force, a plague upon our body.