“He caught a case,” said Maurice, a black teenager whom I’d been tutoring for a while as part of a program to address the needs of“at risk” youth.
“You say that like he caught a cold or something. What happened?” I asked.
(New Press) - ‘A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America’ by Ernest Drucker
(Belknap Press) - ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice’ by William J. Stuntz
“Don’t know. He just caught a case. He’s down at the jail. I’m telling you it’s easier to catch a case around here than to catch a cold.”
I remember thinking: You don’t just catch a case.
Or maybe you do.
Ernest Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar, professor and physician, contends that mass incarceration ought to be understood as a contagious disease, an epidemic of gargantuan proportions. With voluminous data and meticulous analysis, he persuasively demonstrates in his provocative new book, “A Plague of Prisons,” that the unprecedented surge in incarceration in recent decades is a social catastrophe on the scale of the worst global epidemics, and that modes of analysis employed by epidemiologists to combat plagues and similar public health crises are remarkably useful when assessing the origins, harm and potential cures for what he calls our “plague of imprisonment.”
As with any metaphor, the comparison falls short in both obvious and subtle ways. But Drucker is relentless in his pursuit of a paradigm shift, pointing out that even the most obvious differences may be less significant than we may imagine. Biology isn’t everything, he explains, even when fighting medical plagues. Many non-biological, social factors frequently determine who lives and who dies.
In the case of mass imprisonment, it is possible to calculate potential years of life lost and to measure who is most at risk. It is also possible to identify the precise time of the initial outbreak, the means of transmission, intergenerational trends and the ways in which the epidemic has become self-sustaining over time.
Drucker traces the moment of outbreak to the war on drugs. Beginning with the Rockefeller drug laws adopted in New York state in the 1970s, followed by President Ronald Reagan’s declaration of war in 1982, our nation set out to incarcerate millions of Americans for relatively minor crimes and drug offenses. Such arrests go a long way toward explaining how the “infection” has spread. Arrests and convictions for drug offenses, Drucker writes, “are the most important agent of transmission that creates new cases of incarceration.”
Even in the South Bronx, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden communities in New York, only 3 percent of convictions are for felonies. The relatively minor offenses of vagrancy, loitering and drug possession account for half of all arrests, with marijuana possession becoming the most frequent drug charge.
These seemingly minor arrests are the means by which young people contract the virus of imprisonment, which soon becomes a full-blown disease — one they struggle to overcome for the rest of their lives. A criminal record virtually guarantees a lifetime of discrimination in employment, housing, education and public benefits. Millions are locked out of the mainstream society and economy, increasing the likelihood that they will commit more serious crimes. In this way, the epidemic of incarceration has become self-perpetuating, like a plague.
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