bring these arguments forward, I’m also kind of critiquing myself and the way that a number of people have tried to do that within abolition movements. And so, in this presentation, I want to speak from my perspective and try and make this intervention, and think about ways that we can move forward. For a very long time, the mainstream disability rights movement has been active in fighting incarceration – as Liat very eloquently spoke about. And one of the distinctions that has been made by, I think, both the abolition movement and the mainstream disability rights movement is this distinction between people who are incarcerated because of, fundamentally, who they are verses something that they did. Disability rights organizers have consistently tried to distinguish people being in psych(iatric) prisons, [from those] in nursing homes [and] in residential institutions for people with intellectual disabilities; the firstbeing fundamentally unjust because those people are there because of who they are – that’s the injustice. And it’s okay that prisons exist because people did something to get there, they’re bad people so we can justify only working in this one area. But, as I think people here know, that’s a bit of a flawed thesis, and two examples of how that’s untrue are the disproportionate rates of people of colour in the prison system and racist sentencing practices. So, there’s certain people that are criminalized, there’s certain people that are surveilled, there’s certain groups that come into the eyes of the criminal justice system and then those groups are much more likely to go to prison and then stay in prison. So this kind of line – that there’s a difference between being in jail because of something you did verses because of who you are – is just a really false one and it’s a way that I think the disability rights movement has worked to maintain white supremacy.
Since the implementation of neoliberal practices that eliminated or dramatically reduced many social programs, and the shift toward imprisonment of many disabled people – particularly those who are psychiatrized and labelled as intellectually disabled, – we have seen what amounts to a pattern of re-institutionalization – with all of Liat’s very thoughtful and more thought-through comments in that – so just take those two statements together. A number of disability scholars and rights movement activists have now been turning their gaze onto prisons and saying that this is a form reinstitutionalization, and its unjust because so many [people with] disabilities are being in imprisoned in these institutions, which once didn’t imprison as many folks and again, though, really trying to
Disablism on the inside means that disabled people, particularly psychiatrized people, are more likely to be put in maximum security, less likely to be provided programming and have greater barriers to accessing parole – meaning that they spend longer time inside.
Institutions and/as Prisons: Mass Incarceration, Disability & White Supremacy 37