For the past generation, civil rights activists have pushed the courts to apply ever more rigorous standards to criminal prosecutions. At the same time, conservatives have pushed the courts to give the states more authority to contain crime, drugs, and degeneracy. The collision of these political agendas has resulted in the jurisprudence of prevention: courts have preserved the protections of criminal law, but have also given states the authority to avoid some of these protections through civil detentions.

In the prevention cases, the Supreme Court has transformed the traditional police power to restrict disease carriers into a general power to restrict individuals whose criminal activity poses a threat to society.[393] In its infancy, prevention jurisprudence was merely an ad hoc approach *385 that appeared in disparate cases. With Allen,[394] Hilton,[395] and Salerno,[396] it has moved into adolescence. Prevention jurisprudence is characterized by highly technical distinctions between punishment and regulation,[397] meticulous attention to requiring only the bare minimum of procedural due process,[398] and the granting of broad authority to decision makers.[399] These characteristics mirror traditional public health authority.

In the public health model, the decisionmaker is the public health official; the standard for the decision is reasonable medical probability; the individual is treated, and released after the danger of communicability has passed; and the health department is concerned only with future acts.[400] This model works very well for gonorrhea.[401] It is potentially most restrictive in the case of pan-drug-resistant tuberculosis.[402] Most public outcry over the traditional public health model has surrounded HIV/AIDS because the untreatability and inevitable fatality of the disease could be called on to justify the use of such Draconian measures such as indefinite confinement.[403] The jurisprudence of prevention represents legislative and judicial reaction to the real and perceived dangers in *386 American society. The fear is that courts will use the jurisprudence of prevention to impose punishment without affording the procedural protections that the Constitution requires in a criminal context.

The fear that traditional public health authority will be used for sinister ends is exacerbated by the prevention cases. All such rulings have been controversial, drawing fire from dissenting justices[404] and from scholarly commentators.[405] Rather than recognizing the pattern that is emerging from these isolated cases, however, the critics have focused on the arbitrariness of the Supreme Court's actions.

[393] This transformation mirrors the introduction of the doctrine of ferae naturae, that a wild animal belongs to the person who catches it, into modern oil and gas law. Oil and gas were once thought to run free underground. By analogy with the law applying to the capture of wild animals, it was decided that oil and gas belonged to whomever captured it.

[394] See supra Part II, Section B, subsection 5.

[395] See supra Part II, Section B, subsection 6.

[396] See supra Part II, Section B, subsection 7.

[397] Bell, 441 U.S. at 560-62; Salerno, 107 S. Ct. at 2101; Allen, 478 U.S. at 370. See supra note 190 and accompanying text.

[398] See supra note 231 and accompanying text.

[399] Schall 467 U.S. at 278-281. See supra note 283 and accompanying text.

[400] This model does not involve judicial hearings except as necessary to obtain police cooperation in apprehending a recalcitrant disease carrier. If a person is unjustly confined, the only recourse is a habeas corpus petition.

[401] In this context, "working well"' reflects that disease carriers are rapidly treated and returned to the community. The ease and speed of treatment reduces the necessary restriction of individual liberty to a minimum. "Working well"' is harder to evaluate in the face of 3 million cases of gonorrhea a year. See HETHCOTE, supra note 90 at 1.

[402] Once a person becomes symptomatic with tuberculosis he may die unless he is provided prolonged treatment with antituberculosis drugs. It is a difficult disease to treat and requires treatment with somewhat toxic drugs for several months. In some cases, the bacillus becomes resistant to the drugs and thus becomes untreatable. Patients with infectious, drug resistent tuberculosis pose a particular problem because some of the persons that they infect will also develop drug resistent tuberculosis. Pan-drug resistent tuberculosis is frequently fatal in adults and children, despite all available treatments.

Richards, supra note 1, at 149; see also B. KETCHER, L. YOUNG, & M. KODA- KIMBEL, APPLIED THERAPEUTICS: THE CLINICAL USE OF DRUGS 682 (1983).

[403] [T]he point of mandatory AIDS antibody testing is the degradation of gays and the reconsecration of heterosexual supremacy as a sacred value, even though mandatory testing, to date, has not been directly aimed at gays nor, indeed, has made any mention of them. AIDS-testing legislation is not to be understood as business-as-usual public policy-making aimed at maximizing overall social utility or realizing public goods--it can adequately be understood only in terms of the nature and function of social rituals, in particular, purification rituals.

Mohr, Policy, Ritual, Purity: Gays and Mandatory AIDS Testing, 15 L., MED. & HEALTH CARE 178 (1987).

[404] See Allen, 478 U.S. at 375 (Stevens, J., dissenting).

[405] See Constitutional Law--Criminal Law and Procedure: Pretrial Detention--Bail Reform Act of 1984, 101 HARV. L. REV. 169, 179 (1987). This article is illustrative because it recognizes the difficult problem posed by defendants such as Salerno who are willing to kill to avoid prosecution. It does not, however, accept that this real danger justifies beggaring the presumption of innocence. While this is an admirable position from an individual rights perspective, it oversimplifies the role of the Court in preserving societal harmony. For a nonjudgmental discussion of the impact of the decision and its potential mitigation through pretrial services, see Wanger, Limiting Preventive Detention Through Conditional Release: The Unfulfilled Promise of the 1982 Pretrial Services Act, 97 YALE L.J. 320 (1987).