Sociological approaches to the social control of sickness have tended to focus on medicalization or the process through which social phenomena come to be regulated by medicine. Much less is known about how social problems historically understood as medical come to be governed by the criminal law, or what I term the "criminalization of sickness." Thirty three US states have enacted criminal statutes that require all HIV-positive individuals to disclose their infection before engaging in a wide range of sexual practices. Drawing on evidence from 58 felony nondisclosure convictions in Michigan (95% of all convictions between 1992 and 2010), I argue that the enforcement of the state's HIV disclosure law is not driven by medical concerns or public health considerations. Rather, it reflects pervasive moralizing narratives that frame HIV as a moral infection requiring interdiction and punishment.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.11.007 | DOI Listing |
Evol Med Public Health
August 2023
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Along with a classical immune system, we have evolved a behavioral one that directs us away from potentially contagious individuals. Here I show, using publicly available cross-cultural data, that this adaptation is so fundamental that our first impressions of a male stranger are largely driven by the perceived health of his face. Positive (likeable, capable, intelligent, trustworthy) and negative (unfriendly, ignorant, lazy) first impressions are affected by facial health in adaptively different ways, inconsistent with a mere halo effect; they are also modulated by one's current state of health and inclination to feel disgusted by pathogens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoc Sci Med
January 2014
University of Michigan, Department of Sociology, 500 South State Street, Room 3001, LSA Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA; University of Michigan, Department of Women's Studies, 204 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Electronic address:
Sociological approaches to the social control of sickness have tended to focus on medicalization or the process through which social phenomena come to be regulated by medicine. Much less is known about how social problems historically understood as medical come to be governed by the criminal law, or what I term the "criminalization of sickness." Thirty three US states have enacted criminal statutes that require all HIV-positive individuals to disclose their infection before engaging in a wide range of sexual practices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Psychoactive Drugs
November 1995
Institute for Scientific Analysis, San Francisco, California 94123, USA.
The institution of methadone maintenance as a treatment modality for heroin addiction in the mid-1960s was part of the growing medicalization of social problems in the United States. The definition of deviance as "sickness" rather than "badness" set the stage for America's first harm-reduction strategy. By the 1970s methadone maintenance was seen as a way to reduce drug-related crime, and federally funded programs proliferated.
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