A plague of prisons

the long version

"Drucker (criminal justice, City U. of New York, and epidemiology, Columbia U.) applies public health concepts to compare the structure of modern incarceration systems to epidemics from the past. He describes two classic epidemics--cholera in nineteenth-century London and AIDS in twentieth-century New York--to show how the concept and tools of epidemiology work, and explains the anatomy of a major epidemic; the start of mass incarceration in New York State; how the rates of imprisoned people in recent decades show the features of plagues from previous centuries; the impact of incarceration on individuals, their children, and families; and how imprisonment has become a social issue requiring a public health approach"--(booknews.com).