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Punishing Disease

HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness

Trevor Hoppe author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:2nd Jan '18

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Punishing Disease cover

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. Punitive attitudes toward AIDS prompted lawmakers around the country to introduce legislation aimed at criminalizing the behaviors of people living with HIV. Punishing Disease explains how this happened-and its consequences. With the door to criminalizing sickness now open, what other ailments will follow? As lawmakers move to tack on additional diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis to existing law, the question is more than academic.

"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 *

ISBN: 9780520291607

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 408g

288 pages