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

• Author: Jaime L. Hastings
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403412465942
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2014, Vol. 25(3) 397 –402

© 2012 SAGE Publications

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465942CJP25310.1177/0887403412465942C

riminal Justice Policy ReviewBook Reviews

Book Reviews

Ernest Drucker. A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America.

New York, NY: The New Press, 2011. 240 pp. $26.95. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-59558-497-7.

Reviewed by: Jaime L. Hastings, JD, Arlington, VA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0887403412465942

Anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. criminal justice system is aware that

over the past thirty-plus years, the U.S. prison population has grown significantly.

Beginning in the 1970s, American policymakers began to shift from the then-

predominant punishment theory of rehabilitation toward a more “tough on crime”

approach. In 1973, New York State enacted the Rockefeller drug laws that mandated

an elaborate new sentencing regime involving lengthy sentences for a variety of drug

offenses. In an effort to address the rise of heroin use in New York, the Rockefeller

drug laws took away the discretion in sentencing for drug offenses and replaced it with

mandatory and harsh sentencing policies that determined prison terms based upon the

weight and type of drug and the criminal history of the defendant, irrespective of its

violent or nonviolent nature. The Rockefeller drug laws then became the model for

similar sentencing regimes throughout the United States, including California’s noto-

rious three-strikes laws. As a result, the U.S. incarcerated population rate has exploded

and placed significant financial and societal pressures on prison authorities, lawmak-

ers and the community writ large. Prison populations have become bloated to the point

that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Brown v. Plata (No. 09-1233, slip op.

[2011, May 23]) evaluated its negative effects on public safety and welfare outside of

prison walls.

Although the public policy debates over prison reform and incarceration are not

new, Ernest Drucker’s examination of these issues through an epidemiological lens in

Plague of Prisons is unique. Drucker is a public health researcher (scholar in resi-

dence, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice; professor emeritus, Albert Einstein Coll. of

Medicine; adjunct professor, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health),

and he examines the history and consequences of this “modern plague” of incarcera-

tion through epidemiological tools. Drucker justifies his approach because “while epi-

demic diseases and catastrophes may take many lives, they never act in a vacuum”

(p. 7). To get at the root of the incarceration debate, Drucker applies epidemiological

analysis to incarceration policies to “expose the personal, social, and environmental

conditions that are the backdrop to all epidemics and to most large-scale disasters—

especially of the man-made variety . . . [and] to understand large-scale disasters better,

in ways aimed at preventing their recurrence” (p. 9).

Book Reviews