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.
