A Plague of Prisons

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 one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that the current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic, a plague upon our body politic.

Ernest Drucker is a professor of family and social medicine and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as an 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 Soros Justice Fellow, and a founder and former chairman of Doctors of the World /USA.