Sarah Lamble*
This piece
offers reflections on Liat Ben-Moshe’s recent book Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition and
Linda Steele’s recent book Disability,
Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion and their
contributions to abolitionist work, disability justice and decarceration.
I want to begin by saying thank you to both Liat Ben-Moshe and
Linda Steele for their wonderful and much needed books. Their work has shaped
my own thinking in important ways - particularly in deepening my analysis
around the intersections of disability justice and prison abolition - and I've
learnt so much from them both. In this short reflection, I want to say a
few words about each of the books and connect them to wider discussions around
current abolition politics.
Following the widely publicised deaths of George
Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others at the hands of police, the year
2020 brought campaigns for police and prison abolition struggles to greater
focus in the USA, Britain and around the globe. Abolitionist ideas, previously
seen by many as fringe politics on the one hand or obscure academic theory on
the other, entered more mainstream discussions and platforms. Campaigns to
Defund the Police, led by Black Lives Matter organisers, including queer,
feminist and disability justice activists brought abolitionist demands into
public view on a wide scale (Defund the Police 2021; BYP100 2019; Black Lives
Matter UK 2021, Abolition and Disability Justice Coalition 2020).
Numerous articles were published in the mainstream
press explicitly discussing abolition in sympathetic ways (eg. Duffy Rice 2020;
Taylor 2021; Berlatsky 2021), and long-time abolitionist organisers like
Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore were profiled in places like the New York
Times – with Kaba’s writing published under the headline, ‘Yes we mean
literally abolish the police’ (Kaba 2020; Kushner 2019). In Britain there were
protests up and down the country to support Black Lives Matter and also
subsequently to oppose the draconian 2021 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill
– with many of these demonstrations explicitly framed as abolitionist (Kemp
& Duff 2020; Brown 2022).
Though seemingly new to much of the public, the
growing prominence of abolitionist demands had been made possible because of
decades of grassroots organising and strategising, particularly by black-led,
queer, indigenous and disability justice groups, who have laid the groundwork
for greater public engagement with abolitionist ideas and practices (Davis,
Dent, Meiners and Richie 2022; Russell and Stewart 2001; Critical Resistance
2008; Abolitionist Futures 2019; The Red Nation 2021). Yet the histories of
this organising – and the important legacies of abolitionist thought that have
shaped the current moment – are often less well known.
Within this wider context, it is an apt time to be
discussing Ben-Moshe and Steele’s books as they both speak to important
questions of resistance and strategy in challenging institutions of carceral
control and violence. Both scholars urge us to consider how discipline and
control of disability and madness, and their intersections with race, gender
and colonialism, are central features of carceral institutions - whether
prisons, psychiatric hospitals, forced residential institutions for people with
intellectual disabilities, or court diversion programmes.
Both books
confront the ways that carceral logics, knowledges and practices are bound up
with processes of debilitation and disablement, and expose how deployments of
carceral power extend well beyond the confines of the prison walls themselves.
For example, as Steele demonstrates, even seemingly well-meaning efforts to
create alternatives to prison, such as court diversion schemes for disabled
people, can simply extend the power of the prison by bringing carceral controls
into communities. In highlighting these connections, Ben-Moshe and
Steele’s books offer us vital insights for grappling with strategic questions
around working towards more effective means of decarceration and disability
justice.
Ben-Moshe’s
book, Decarcarating Disability (2020), foregrounds lessons we can
learn from historical campaigns around the deinstitutionalisation of disabled
people as part of wider anti-carceral social movements and struggles for
abolition. The book powerfully explores the tensions and challenges
between reformist and abolition strategies – and the difficulty of navigating
these tensions in practice. In doing so, Ben-Moshe’s analysis invites us to
reflect on contemporary struggles and pose critical questions about whether
particular tactics and ‘common sense’ ideas around disability and imprisonment
will move us towards a more abolitionist horizon or whether they are likely to
fall prey to dead-end reformist traps. As her careful documentation of
struggles for deinstitutionalisation reveals, the answers to such questions are
rarely straightforward.
Ben-Moshe’s book
considers these strategic dilemmas with nuance, depth and care, but without
sacrificing the radicality of her broader vision, something which is especially
needed in the current moment as abolitionist ideas become more mainstream. For
example, by using an abolitionist frame to trace the deinstitutionalisation
movement of the 1960s and 70s – which fought to shut down horrifically abusive
psychiatric hospitals and residential institutions for people with psychiatric
and intellectual disabilities – Ben-Moshe interweaves careful analysis of the
key gains of that movement alongside incisive evaluation of the fraughtness of
those struggles and their ongoing challenges today. Here Ben-Moshe
provides an important ‘cautionary tale of success’ (2020, p 4) which offers
vital lessons for contemporary activists seeking to further decarceration
goals. She also confronts the widespread myth that deinstitutionalisation
subsequently led to the increased homelessness and incarceration of disabled
people and redirects our attention to real underlying forces of racism and
neoliberal policies (2020, Chapter 4).
In linking deinstitutionalisation and abolition, Decarcerating
Disability also does important work in challenging the silo-ing of
struggles and moving away from narrow visions of ‘alternatives’ to
imprisonment, e.g., discrete measures that replace one institutional model or
carceral regime for another. Instead, the book repeatedly emphasises the
importance of a much broader vision – one that confronts the complex systemic
and structural dynamics that produce carcerality and disablement – and the need
for a deeper epistemology of abolitionist ‘knowing and unknowing’ (2020,
Chapter 3). Here Ben-Moshe invites us to consider abolition as much more than a
political framework or agenda for action, but as counter-hegemonic knowledge
that can open up new and radical ways of organising society as a whole.
Abolitionist epistemologies are forms of knowing that challenge the status quo,
question take-for-granted assumptions and enable the “letting go of attachment
to certain ways of knowing” (2020, p. 126). These practices of knowing and
unknowing not only enable a critique of carceral logics and reformist traps,
but also open up “possibilities of other life worlds that cannot be imagined
now” (2020, p. 130).
Ben-Moshe’s book is also a model of how to do
scholarly work in dialogue and engagement with on-the-ground organising work.
Too often there are tendencies in the academy to collaborate with
activist knowledge in superficial or token ways, and yet in Decarcerating
Disability, the engagement with activism is deeply embedded and infused
throughout the book in powerful and compelling ways. The book also helps to
connect analysis of past struggles, current organising and future movements for
change.
Steele’s book, Disability, Criminal Justice and Law
(2020) also offers vital lessons around the nexus of disability and carceral
control, particularly in drawing attention to the ways that seemingly benign
alternatives – such as court diversion programmes – can be deeply embedded in
carceral logics and practices. The book deftly overturns the widespread
assumption that court diversion programmes for disabled people are a
‘progressive’ or non-carceral approach, and demonstrates the harm and violence
that is done to disabled people through these schemes.
Steele’s book exposes not just the limits of court
diversion for disabled people, but also identifies the ways in which the
exercise of carceral power through diversion schemes actively works to
debilitate and harm disabled people. The book meticulously documents how court
diversion schemes function as coercive interventions that reinforce racist and
colonial modes of power, further entrench socioeconomic inequalities, and
entangle ‘social support’ with punitive control.
While Steele’s book isn’t explicitly framed in terms
of the debates around ‘reformist reforms’ versus ‘abolitionist reforms’
(Berger, Kaba and Stein 2017), the analysis lends itself helpfully to those
discussions. The book clearly illustrates how well-meaning reforms end up
extending carceral powers – largely because such reforms operate within the
existing punitive frameworks, logics and knowledge-regimes of the criminal
justice system.
Reading Ben-Moshe and Steele’s books together offers
readers a cautionary tale – both about the limits of analysis that does not
consider the connections between carcerality and disablement but also the
necessity for more radical visions that confront the structural underpinnings
of harm and violence and move in more abolitionist and decarceral directions.
Both books also highlight the importance of building
opportunities for coalitional politics. For example, drawing on Abram J
Lewis’ work, Ben-Moshe references a point in the 1970s when campaigners in the
US were calling to end psychiatry and psychiatric detention full stop, and gays
and lesbians were invited to join that call. But rather than supporting that
broad movement, many gay liberation organisers opted instead to take the
narrower position of declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness. In doing
so, they carved out a space for gays and lesbians to be positioned outside that
pathologizing framework, but without questioning the framework itself
(Ben-Moshe 2020; p.97; Lewis 2016; see also Kunzel 2017). It was a missed
opportunity to expose the wider harms of psychiatry’s constructions of
normal/abnormal, sane/mad and its rationales for carceral controls of disabled
and mad people more broadly.
The resonances with wider patterns in mainstream
LGBTQ+ politics are striking. Although early gay liberation work centred
campaigns against criminalisation and imprisonment, once homosexuality was
formally decriminalised in many Anglo and European countries, later generations
of LGBTQ+ organisations, particularly the more class and race-privileged ones,
have largely abandoned prisoner solidarity and anticarceral work. Arguably,
this was due to a narrow analytical framework that saw queer criminalisation as
a ‘flaw in the system’ rather than symptomatic of the fundamental harms of
prisons and carceral power more widely (Lamble 2013).
Steele’s book likewise speaks to these concerns by
drawing attention to the dangers of organisations and advocates getting pulled
into calls to support seemingly benign but ultimately harmful reforms like
‘diversion programmes’– and how these projects become a missed opportunity for
pushing a more systemic challenge of carceral powers.
In prompting discussions about opportunities for
coalition, both books also implicitly raise broader questions about the
crossover of academic and activist work. Despite a long tradition of
activist-scholarship which bridges academic and community organising work, the
relationship between academia and activism remains fraught; tensions, divisions
and challenges routinely arise, particularly when navigating power
differentials among academic and community organiser positions, as well as
institutional pressures (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2021). How best to
engage in activist-scholar work – and how to do so ethically, pragmatically and
impactfully – remains an open and ongoing point of discussion, particularly in
educational, research and community contexts dominated by neoliberal
frameworks. A simple yet key guiding question is offered at the outset of
Ben-Moshe’s book: “Is this going to aid in liberating people?” (2020, p x).
This is indeed “a core question at the heart of abolitionist praxis”(2020, p.
x) and one that we all benefit from continually posing.
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