![]() ![]() ![]() The carceral state is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of disability justice.ĭisability Justice is a set of ten principles articulated by Patty Berne and created with otherĭisabled BIPOC leaders. I also want to acknowledge the work of Chelsea Alvarez who consulted on this project. So since it’s important, I’m including it. Lived experience is a valid and irreplaceable place to gain knowledge. We talk a lot about the importance of hearing from people with lived experience, but then only listen to degreed “experts.” As someone who is both, my lived experience as a disabled person, especially one who has spent time in psych wards, has been more instructional than anything I can cite. I’ve intentionally written this from a first-person perspective and included insights from my lived experience. I have been involved and writing about disability justice for a few years now and I’m the co-chair of the NLG Disability Justice Committee. I’ve been a social worker and have been in psych wards. This is all informed by my identity as a working class white chronically ill and crazy queer sex worker with a J.D. Instead I hope to add to the analysis by also including a disability justice perspective, and what all of this really looks like and means on the ground for disabled people, especially Black disabled people. Disability has a huge relationship to incarceration and policing, so it also needs to have a relationship to abolition.ĭisability justice requires an intersectional approach, and the point of this is not to read Blackness out of the analysis, because Blackness multiplies the consequences of ableism and the harms of the carceral state. Between 25 and 40 percent of people with mental illness will be jailed or incarcerated at some point in their life, and the country’s largest mental health facility is a prison. Also, half of police killings are of disabled people. People in prison are three times and people in jail four times as likely to have a disability than those who aren’t incarcerated. Disabled people, especially Black and Native disabled people, are disproportionately harmed by prisons and policing. I also hope to make clear that abolition is a disability issue, which means that mainstream disability rights organizations should also be involved in the fight to abolish police and prisons.ĭisability justice requires the abolition of police and prisons. To those ends, I looked at abolition through a disability justice lens and identified some of the ways disabled people are affected by the carceral systems, not just in jail and prison but other manifestations of the carceral state like doctors, social workers, and other individuals and institutions. The carceral state goes beyond jails and prisons, so if we want to abolish the cops in our head and our hearts, we need to identify the ways they exist and build alternatives. ![]() It’s an opportunity for us to make sure that we bring abolitionist support to all movements, including the disability justice movement. The NLG has been an explicitly abolitionist organization since 2015, when we passed a resolution that calls for “dismantling and abolition of all prisons and of all aspects of systems and institutions that support, condone, create, fill, or protect prisons.”Īs police and prison abolition becomes more mainstream – thanks to the work of Black feminist thinkers like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba – the NLG has an important role to play in moving the abolition movement forward. We also mean the cop in your head and your heart.” - TourmalineĪs co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Disability Justice Committee (NLG DJC), I spend a lot of time thinking about the way disability justice can be used to support social movements. ![]() By Katie Tastrom, Disability Justice Committee Co-Chair ![]()
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