Disability Justice Is an Essential Part of Abolishing Policing and Ending Incarceration | published in Abolition for the People, Kaepernick Publishing, Oct. 2021

About this anthology and essay: Written by Talila A. Lewis, Esq., this essay was originally published in October 2020 in Abolition for the People, an online peer-reviewed anthology that brought together thirty essays from political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by anti-Black/Indigenous policing/prison systems. On October 12, 2021, Kaepernick Publishing published this essay along side more than thirty others in its first printed book, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing & Prisons,.

The book features cover art designed by the inimitable Emory Douglas, and was edited by Colin Kaepernick, alongside Professors Connie Wun and Christopher Petrella. You will find this essay alongside essays from Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, Robin D. G. Kelley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruha Benjamin, Naomi Murakawa, Dylan Rodríguez, Russell "Maroon" Shoatz, Kenyon Farrow, Tamara K. Nopper, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Derecka Purnell, Marlon Peterson, Rukia Lumumba, and many others.

​Learn more about this project here; review versions of many of the essays online here. The online hashtag archive is at least partially available at #AbolitionForThePeople.

All rights reserved. Do not reproduce, harvest, or "use" this essay in any way without requesting and receiving express and explicit consent from both the author and publisher.

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Image of this essay, pg. 66, of the text, Abolition for the People.

While it is well known that policing in the united states was originally developed and later honed to control Black and Indigenous people’s lives (these are not mutually exclusive groups) — our movement, labor, speech, ownership, family, and more — most are unaware that disabled people (and those labeled disabled) have always been primary among the carceral machine’s intended targets. In fact, there is evidence disabled people have the most frequent and catastrophic encounters with carceral systems, and ableism has long been central to the nation’s economic, political, legal, and social anatomy. Indeed, no social justice issue, including abolition, can be properly addressed without intentionally centering disability and ableism — and no social justice movement can be successful without disability justice at its heart.

Understanding Disability, Ableism, Policing, and Incarceration

Most of society has come to understand disability through a lens of whiteness, wealth, and other privileges that actively exclude the experiences of Black/Indigenous and low- and no-income people. Importantly, disabled people are disproportionately impacted by deprivation, violence and/or precarity. These environmental factors and socioeconomic experiences are a cause, complicator, and even consequence of all manner of disability.

More importantly, one does not have to be disabled to experience ableism. Rather, ableism is a systemic oppression that allows social systems and individuals to assign value to people based on their appearance and their ability to re/produce, excel, and behave, among other things. Ableism evaluates people on their divergence (whether actual or perceived) from constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, and productivity. 

In the united states, these constructions are necessarily rooted, as is the country itself, in anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, misogyny, eugenics, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. For example, enslavers, scientists and doctors, economists, religious leaders, and others claimed that Black people were less intelligent, capable, and sentient and therefore naturally suited for slave labor. To this day, Black/Indigenous people and low and no income people--regardless of their disability status--are depicted as biologically inferior, less capable of making societal contributions, and more likely to be dependent on others. These ableist ideas are used to justify violence, discrimination and oppression including medical rationing, labor exploitation, incarceration and institutionalization, family regulation, deprivation of resources, and more. 

Still, most people in social justice movements are unable to recognize ableism, and are unaware of just how ordinary yet lethal it is. But, policing, incarceration and institutionalization, labor exploitation and impoverishment, forced familial separation and deprivation of resources, climate and environmental injustice, and other state and corporate violence disproportionately affect disabled and other marginalized people while creating and exacerbating disabilities.

Disability justice is a requisite for abolition because carceral systems medicalize, pathologize, criminalize, and commodify survival, divergence, and resistance.

The past and present connections between disability and all forms of carceral violence are overt and overwhelming. Disabled/neurodivergent people comprise just 26% of the united states population — but represent up to half of the people killed by police, over 50% of the incarcerated adult prison population, up to 85% of the incarcerated youth population, and a significant number of those incarcerated in medicalized carceral spaces like nursing facilities, group facilities, and civil commitment, “treatment” facilities, and “hospitals.” Whether under the pretense of “care” or “corrections,” disabled people are highly represented in all carceral populations. History explains this phenomenon.

The united states government and corporations have always used constructed ideas about disability and criminality alongside constructed ideas about class and race to classify, criminalize, cage, and disappear its “undesirables.” In this way, those in positions of power maintain the white supremacist status quo and create an exploitable labor pool while sowing discord within and across marginalized communities.

For instance, mainstream doctors and scientists diagnosed Black enslaved people who engaged in work stoppages, “property” destruction, or “theft” with dysaesthesia aethiopica, or “rascality.” Similarly, mere thoughts of escaping enslavement was dubbed drapetomania. In both cases, these purported mental illnesses could only be had by Black people, and could only be “cured” by yet more unpaid hard labor and insufferable violence. These legitimate acts of resistance to enslavement (one of the first forms of incarceration) were not only labeled as mental illnesses, but they were simultaneously deemed criminal/delinquent. Or take the 1880 census’ “3D schedule,” which described the so-called “dependent, defective, and delinquent classes” using terms rooted in eugenics — now considered disability slurs — to label people as: “idiots; insane inhabitants; deaf and dumb; blind; homeless children; inhabitants in prisons; paupers and indigent inhabitants in institutions, poor houses or asylums, or boarded at public expense in private houses.” Forced institutionalization/incarceration and sterilization of people in all of these “classes” was not uncommon, and continues to this day. Carceral classifications premised on sex assigned at birth operate as a form of eugenics where people labeled deviant, disabled, and/or dependent are confined in conditions that rob them their ability to conceive during their most fertile years.

If this is not evidence enough, disenfranchisement of people with felony records and people with disabilities can often be found within the same section of many laws. Many felon-disabled disenfranchisement laws were enacted in the years immediately following the 1840 U.S. Census. This census falsely claimed that Black people had higher incidences of “idiocy” and “insanity” than white people, and that free Black people had even higher incidences of these disabilities than enslaved Black people. 

Supporters of enslavement were committed to proving that Black people could not handle freedom. White doctors and scientists were interested in honing eugenics theories and practices to prevent Black/Indigenous people and others labeled “dependent, delinquent and defective” from reproducing and freely moving in and around “civilized” society. All the while, white legislators used the same ableist-racist-classist arguments to justify civic, social, economic deprivation to the same groups of people. Legislators crafted false narratives of laziness, ignorance, and uncivility to collectively disqualify people labelled “idiots” or “insane” or felons from voting.  What many now call collateral consequences of incarceration — being barred from voting or holding public office, even after release — are often still called “civil disabilities.” Modern coronavirus criminalization, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct laws, and police officers and unions together with the medical-carceral industrial complex using pseudoscience diagnoses like excited delirium--a modern pseudoscience diagnosis that is used as legal justification for unjustifiable law enforcement murders of mostly multiply marginalized people--all help illuminate the unbroken chain between past and present carceral logics.

These warped and circular rationales are used to justify horrific exploitation, experimentation, and extermination. They also quell public outcry over what otherwise would be deemed indefensible theft of dignity, life, and liberty. 

The goal of criminal and medical incarceration has always been civic, social, economic, and physical marginalization and death of people who society deems unfit. The categories of what constitutes “unworthy” are  intentionally broad and intersected as to be endlessly applicable. The nimble, timeless, and comprehensive nature of structural and systemic oppression demonstrates that power holders deeply appreciate how identities intersect and illustrate why intentionally intersectional responses to state violence are necessary.
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When abolitionists do not have a strong disability justice analysis, systems of incarceration simply recategorize and redistribute people into other violent carceral institutions for other manufactured reasons — often based on purported health concerns, criminality, and vulnerability. Knowing this, we are left no choice but to view carcerality much more broadly, through a disability justice lens. If we fail to fill this gap in our collective consciousness, ableism will continue to be used as an excuse for inflicting violence upon marginalized people under the guise of care, treatment, and rehabilitation.

The Difference Between Disability Rights and Disability Justice

Whereas disability rights seeks to change social conditions for some disabled people via law and policy, disability justice moves beyond law and policy. Disability Justice seeks to radically transform social conditions and norms in order to affirm and support all people’s inherent right to live and thrive. All social justice movements, then, must put the needs of disabled people — especially those at the margins of the margins — front and center. This work begins with unearthing and understanding the inextricable links between ableism and other systems of oppression.
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Abolitionist movements must contend with how disability and ableism interact with carceral-medical systems. These movements must be committed to abolishing all spaces to which marginalized people are disappeared. Disability rights communities must begin to practice disability justice and disability solidarity. Both of these frameworks demand a radical reorientation of our collective understanding of systems of oppression especially as related to disability, inter/dependence, and carcerality. Advocates for any other form of social justice, especially racial, environmental, and economic justice must work to understand how ableism interacts with other oppressions and violence to create, perpetuate, and exacerbate inequities.

Such a comprehensive approach would challenge carcerality at its core. No longer could arbitrary concepts of class, criminality, or disability serve as a wedge between disability and abolitionists’ struggles — for they are one and the same.
Similar to transformative justice and abolition frameworks,  disability justice fundamentally alters our approach to everything we think and do. It provides meaningful and necessary context for marginalized people’s responses to their lived experiences. It helps us politicize our disabilities, love ourselves and others more fully, creatively dismantle oppression, and uplift people who are perpetually marginalized within our own communities and movements. It honors Black/Indigenous disabled wisdom, builds strong care networks, and develops community/cultural health and healing workers. It helps foreground the necessity of harm reduction, healing and transformative justice, and supplants punitive responses that find refuge in carceral logics and spaces. And it develops the requisite relationships, knowledge, and tools to help us practice accountable advocacy across identities, communities, and movements.

Abolition depends on racial, economic, and healing justice — all of which depend on disability justice. We have an opportunity to bring to the fore experiences and connections that have largely been invisibilized in the abolition movement. Now is the time to challenge dominant narratives about disability, ableism, policing, and incarceration — to invite people to revisit everything they think they know about interlocking systems of oppression, and to commit themselves to disability justice. Successful abolition strategies will weave communities together by highlighting the ties between oppressions that lead to seemingly intractable structural and systemic inequity.

October 2020 Abolition For The People online release schedule from Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL. Police & Policing - Week of Oct 6 Colin Kaepernick, Dr. Angela Davis, Dr. Simone Browne, Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Kiese Laymon / Gwendolyn Woods, Dr. Stuart Schrader, Talila "TL" Lewis, Dr. kihana ross, Kimberlé Crenshaw | Prisons & Carcerality - Week of Oct 12 Morning Star Gali, Dr. Ameer Hassan Loggins, Dr. Jody D. Armour, Russel Maroon Shoatz, III and Russell Maroon Shoatz Jr., Dean Spade, Kenyon Farrow, Cristina Jimenez and Cynthia Garcia | Fuck Reform - Week of Oct 19 Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, Darrick Hamilton, Dr. Naomi Murakawa, Bree Newsome Bass, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Derecka Purnell | Abolition Now - Week of Oct 26 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, Marlon Peterson, Rukia Lumumba, Dr. Dan Berger and Dr. David Stein, Andrea J. Ritchie, Frieda Afary & Lara al-Kateb, Mariame Kaba