Hoppe, T., Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness, Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520965300 (ebk) ISBN 9780520291584 (hbk)

In a book of two parts, Trevor Hoppe addresses the question of whether criminal punishment should have a place in public health. He focuses on HIV (formerly known as GRID: gay-related immune deficiency) as his case study as a disease that has been the subject of cruel social stigma, violent homophobic messaging and legal efforts to contain, control and punish via mandatory reporting laws. Part one, ‘Punitive Disease Control’, explores the history of punishment-based responses to communicable diseases, and part two, ‘Criminalization of sickness’, discusses the methods by which HIV became criminalised by disclosure laws, and who they most affected. Hoppe turns on its head the established sociological notion of medicalising ‘badness’ – the application of clinical diagnoses to what has previously been considered poor social behaviour – by inviting us to consider the criminalising of clinical diagnosis, and its implications and impacts for people with HIV in the United States. In doing so, he establishes an important call to undermine the stigma still associated with HIV and improve individual, local and institutional efforts to prevent infection. Hoppe uses compelling qualitative interview extracts and policy documents from local health departments across the US to evidence his arguments. In this review, I provide an overview of the book chapters in order to reflect the building blocks of the narrative Hoppe provides.