Punishing Disease

"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 *