How America’s prison epidemic spread

How did America’s addiction to prisons and mass incarceration get its start and how did it spread from state to state? Of the many attempts to answer this question, none makes as much sense as the explanation found in a new book titled “A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America.” According to public-health expert and Columbia professor Ernest Drucker, the rapid growth and spread of American prisons follows the classic life cycle of an infectious bacterial or viral epidemic.