Punishing Disease

The criminalization fever has arrived, and recent developments suggest it may be contagious. In 2014, Iowa reconsidered its HIV-specific criminal law after a widely reported case involving an HIV-positive gay man accused of having sex with a condom yielded a twenty-five-year prison term and lifetime sex offender registration. After a statewide advocacy campaign, the Iowa legislature moved to reduce the penalties for cases involving low risk—a success that was widely heralded by advocates as a sign of “modernization.” Less discussed was the simultaneous move to add a bevy of other infectious diseases to the criminal law, including tuberculosis and hepatitis. Left-leaning advocacy groups celebrated this shift as a triumph over AIDS stigma. Iowa’s legislative reform comes on the heels of a similar expansion in Tennessee, where the legislature voted to extend their HIV-specific criminal statute to individuals infected with Hepatitis B or C. These troubling developments suggest that the logic of criminalizing diseases is spreading and becoming more deeply entrenched in American society. This chapter reviews how this happened and explains why it is a problem for American society.