Literary Analysis Essay on Punishing the Disease

Introduction

Punishing The Disease is a book written by Trevor Hoppe and was originally published on 10th November 2017. Trevor Hoppe is an author and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina. The book focuses on the criminal law that is used in the prosecution of people that refuse to disclose their status to their partners. The author examines how the disease was transformed into being a badness which the culprits were treated under criminal law.The title of the book is directly related to its content as it focuses on the punishment of persons infected with HIV. In this piece of work, we focus on reviewing the book and the opinion of the author about the condition.

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The publication by Trevor Hoppe is based on public health and criminal justice and aims at establishing how they were interrelated. In the 1960s and 1970s, rehabilitative methods were applied in fighting the prevalence and transmission of the disease. The American correction policy, however, drastically changed and more coercive means were employed. This resulted in the increase in the population of American inmates to being about 1 million persons. According to the author the significant factors that contributed to the shift in the correction policy of the country included; increased crime rates, inconsistency in the social science findings which resulted to the American criminal justice system losing confidence in them. Racism was also a major factor that resulted in black Americans being majorly associated with crime.

Hoppe believes that the three factors were the major results of the mass incarceration that is witnessed in the country today with the country registering the highest incarceration rate in the world (Hope, 2017 page 4). Sociologists argued that the incarceration have contributed to the disruption of the organization of American society. The author reveals that the measures employed to fight the disease, which is widely known to be sexually transmitted, is among the recent efforts to control the disease by public coercion. The activity is linked to the fight that was employed against epidemics such as smallpox which were not sexually transmitted.

The coercive approach in public health has been made away with over time, and the main emphasis is now on proper sanitation and healthy eating. Medical technologies believed that these new strategies would help reduce the rate of infection. This, however, did not apply to HIV as the coercive measures of the past were primarily employed in curbing the disease. The author has focused on establishing the factors that contributed to the criminalization of the illness.

The primary questions that the author aims at answering in this book were the reasons why police were involved in solving a problem that was termed as medical. Also, the author tries to establish how the disease is sued in a court of law and the effects of criminalization of the illness. He establishes three significant reasons why the authorities responded to the condition in a punitive manner. Some of the ideas developed in the book include; At the time of emergence of the disease, incarceration had already been adopted in the country as a means of solving social problems. This meant that the authorities already had the basis on which they were acting against the disease.

Nonetheless, at the time of the emergence of the disease, it was linked to specific social groups that were already hated and despised in society (Hoppe,2017). When the first case of the disease was reported, there was a major fight against same-sex partners, and immediately the emergence of the disease was reported it was linked to four groups of the society namely; hemophiliacs, heroin users, homosexuals and Haitians. The individuals were regarded as criminals in the community; hence, the association of the disease with them gave a basis of the punitive measures employed in fighting the disease.

Thirdly, the primary cause of AIDS was unknown during the 1980s.On emergence; the disease was named Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) which linked the illness to the homosexual group of the society. The uncertainty of its cause gave a chance to the rise of different theories on what was causing the disease. The cause of the illness was not viewed to be a virus as it is widely known but was taken to be as a result of deviant behavior such as homosexuality. This, thus, formed a basis of criminalization of the disease and inflicting of punishments on the persons that were infected.

According to Hoppe, a combination of the three factors significantly led to the adaption of the punitive measures against HIV in a manner that had never been witnessed in the country. The author, however, does not view criminal justice or criminal law as being good or bad, but he only gives his opinion on how they came to be related in control of HIV. The book provides a deeper understanding of how the system is connected and how the victims are punished. Punishment in this context does involve not only the action of state authorities but also the stigma that the individuals who suffer from the disease went through. The primary cause of stigma was the general lack of knowledge on what the cause of the disease was.

In each chapter of this book, the author has focused on evaluating a different aspect of criminalization of the disease. The author has written the book in a way that one can get the picture on the relationship that existed between criminal law and public health in America. The aspect may, however, be much unknown to some individuals who live in countries that have never experienced criminalization of a disease. The main aim of Trevor Hoppe of writing 'Punishing The Disease' was not to purely exhaust on the issue of criminalization of HIV in America or propose more straightforward ways of dealing with the disease but was mainly to examine how to control a disease became connected with punishment and the primary effect of this connection.

The language and approach that has been employed by Trevor Hoppe is simple and makes it easy for a reader to get the main point. The author has written the book by including the history of criminalization of diseases which establishes a basis for the reader to understand the topic clearly. It can generally be termed to be readable and engaging and makes it suitable for use in different settings such as criminal studies, gender studies, political science and by undergraduate students in carrying out their investigations.

Works Cited

Hoppe, Trevor. Punishing Disease: HIV and the criminalization of sickness. Univ of California Press, 2017.