Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness
ISBN: 9780520965300
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: AIDS (Disease) -- Social aspects -- United States; AIDS (Diseases) -- Law and legislation -- United States;

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.

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.