Punishing Disease - by Trevor Hoppe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV--mostly stigmatized minorities--began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punishing Disease looks at how HIV was transformed from sickness to badness under the criminal law and investigates the consequences of inflicting penalties on people living with disease. Now that the door to criminalizing sickness is open, what other ailments will follow? With moves in state legislatures to extend HIV-specific criminal laws to include diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis, the question is more than academic.

From the Back Cover

"What happens when a nation seduced by carceral solutions confronts a dreaded disease linked to sex and drugs? Trevor Hoppe's thorough and well-documented analysis explains how and why legislators, courts, public health officials, and police across the United States have 'criminalized sickness' in the case of HIV/AIDS. Punishing Disease is a wake-up call about the dangers of punitive approaches to stopping the spread of disease."--Steven Epstein, author of Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research

"Sociologists have examined a plethora of human conditions that have been medicalized and treated as illness. This well-researched book examines a case that flips medicalization on its head: how HIV/AIDS, a devastating disease, became criminalized, and with what consequences. Trevor Hoppe's clear analysis sheds important new light on how the meanings of disease and illness have significant social, political, and health consequences."--Peter Conrad, Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences, Brandeis University

"We might like to think that public health policy in the twenty-first century is enlightened and guided by science. Trevor Hoppe's Punishing Disease shatters any such illusion. In this carefully researched and meticulously argued book, Hoppe shows how fear and stigma have combined with Americans' belief that people are responsible for their own health and our increasing reliance on the criminal justice system to effectively criminalize HIV status. This important book should be read not only by those who are interested in America's response to HIV but also by everyone who cares about public health policy."--Wendy E. Parmet, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Health and Policy Law, Northeastern University

Review Quotes

"This book offers numerous points of consideration that are relevant not only to the epidemic he discusses, but also our current pandemic. Notions of shame, stigma, misinformation (fake news) and punishment can immediately be applied to our experiences of COVID‐19. Though it is likely to find audiences amongst social scientists and public health professionals, I would argue that it has value for anyone interested in the relationship between disease and law, including those in the legal profession, policymakers and students. It is forensic and thorough, but engaging and accessible in terms of structure and language. . . . Hoppe offers a powerful, gently subversive text that is a call to action to build a new selection of tools to rebuild our epidemic responses, and to stop punishing disease."-- "Sociology of Health & Illness"

"Punishing Disease [is] engagingly written and accessible to non-scientific and non-academic audiences, [and] impressively deploys the tools of sociology, criminology, and epidemiology to help us understand the baleful consequences of reacting to a public health emergency with punishment instead of compassion."-- "Undark"

"A thoroughly researched, detailed account of how the promotion of a model of individual responsibility for a fatal disease such as HIV serves to transform a medical problem into a criminal problem... Recommended." -- "CHOICE"

"Offer[s] up a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of HIV exposure and disclosure law over decades . . . Serves as a call for future work to continue to elucidate the myriad ways 'public health' unfurls in insidious and corrosive ways."-- "American Journal of Sociology"

About the Author

Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and a coeditor of The War on Sex.