Abstract
With a foreword from Angela Davis, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada promises and delivers an anthology of outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship. Edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison Carey, the collection of work weaves together past and present histories of the incarceration and segregation of disabled persons without losing sight of the future. The subject matter transcends the border between America and Canada. Eventually, readers are encouraged to rise above the past and the present and give themselves over to a hopeful and idealistic vision of the future.
The text is most likely to be used as a graduate-level reader in a seminar that does not shy away from linking contemporary theory to practice, and scholarship with abolition activism. Michel Foucault, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Peter Conrad, Erving Goffman, Jacques Derrida, Angela Davis, and Thomas Szasz seem to drive and inspire multiple pieces within the collection. However, many of the authors in this anthology seem to be inspired not just by the sacred cows of their respective disciplines, but by each other. One of the most notable accomplishments of the authors is their ability to put theorists such as Foucault and Goffman to work for them to accomplish their own goals. In doing so, the scholars of this anthology demonstrate the utility of employing contemporary theory to guide important and timely scholarship and advocacy. In addition to the theoretical texts that seem to drive this collection, the reader is exposed to a wide variety of current information, from “Democracy Now!” to Marc Mauer from The Sentencing Project.
All of the scholars write boldly, with gusto and enthusiasm. While the book is an anthology of individual studies on disability and incarceration, the reader is left with a cohesive sense of witnessing a community of scholars interacting with one another, supporting one another, and reading and learning from one another, not just citing one another. The reader is steered away from shallow empiricism and encouraged to rethink the utilitarian vision of employing dividing practices to achieve the ideals of modernity. In fact, the contemporary tone of these chapters forces the reader to come face to face with the broken promises of an overtly paternalist and therapeutic state. Unpacked for all to see is the modernist baggage that seems to follow all of the naïve intentions associated with the machinery of institutionalization.
Partly due to the organization of the collection—a quasi-temporal order—the reader is exposed to example upon example of inhumane and unjust dividing practices. More specifically, each work within the anthology is loosely linked through a past, present, and future interpretation of the subject matter of cruelty, segregation, exclusion, incarceration, and neglect. The disease of power in conjunction with the pervasive ordering of subjects brings on the inevitable conclusion that all coercive systems of institutionalization are inherently dehumanizing and even inhumane. While unstated, the authors’ assumptions are clear. Contemporary systems of public health and public safety, which have been created to serve the citizenry, are now positioned as culturally hegemonic and structurally sovereign, autonomously operating without the consent of the citizenry.
Contributions from Ben-Moshe bookend the assortment, and the works of the other two editors, Chapman and Carey, are equally strong. Rather than shy away from the difficult and uncomfortable, these authors dive headfirst into the subject matter. While the title may allude to the disciplines of sociology and criminology, scholars of criminological history, restorative justice, peacemaking, medical sociology, and critical criminology will benefit from reading this anthology. Strangely enough, absent from these chapters is any mention of Weber and his most important conceptual contribution, the Iron Cage. Even so, Disability Incarcerated should be mandatory reading for any graduate-level seminar that forces first-year graduate students of sociology or criminology to consume Marx’s Capital, or Weber’s Economy and Society or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Disability Incarcerated has much to offer graduate students of sociology and criminology who are grappling with classical and contemporary constructions of agency and structure. Explicating (and excavating) the individual out of the rubble of our contemporary bureaucracies is no easy task. Even so, Nirmala Erevelles writes, in “Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline,”
There is rarely a “biological” basis for these labels (disability, at-risk). It is also generally understood that the assignment of these labels are [sic] arbitrary—I would say historical . . . . The material consequences of these assignments are horribly damaging—students move from segregated classrooms to alternative schools to becoming school dropouts to becoming completely alienated from the labor market and the wider social world and eventually many find themselves in prison—a humiliating passage along the school to prison pipeline. (p. 96)
Discussions like this are not only germane for graduate students of sociology and criminology; such discussions are critical for the health and well-being of our social order.
The anthology reminds the reader of what is hiding in plain sight, that hundreds of millions of citizens are processed daily through a labyrinth of bureaucracies that snake through western civilizations, managing and regulating the behavior of rivers of individuals. Western civilizations and the citizens that these bureaucracies are charged with disciplining are more often than not born into bureaucracies (hospitals), educated in bureaucracies (public school systems), work within bureaucracies (private and state systems of employment), and die within bureaucracies (hospitals again). From cradle to grave, individuals must negotiate their own life course as they all constantly interact, willingly and unwillingly (with jails, prisons, and/or asylums), with numerous bureaucracies, all within the confines of Weber’s Iron Cage.
Disability Incarcerated consistently and successfully maps yesterday and today’s rational legal landscape of authority, knowledge, and power. It is a landscape that normalizes (and de-normalizes) all citizens, whether or not they choose to participate. It is a landscape that regularly demonstrates the forces of institutionalization and power with outcomes that regularly and historically privilege some races and classes to the detriment of the “The Disabled” and to the detriment of “The Other.” Weber’s idealized model of a rationally organized institution hinges upon its ability to consistently demonstrate “impersonality.” Nevertheless, populating “impersonal spaces” with “persons” has created new chapters of cruelty within the histories of humanity.
Disability Incarcerated instructs the reader to empty the structures of oppression and shut down the institutions of coercion and cruelty. In the words of Liat Ben-Moshe,
The goal is not to replace one form of control, such as hospital, institution, and prison, with another, such as psychopharmaceuticals, nursing homes, and group homes. The aspiration is to fundamentally change the way we respond to difference or harm, the way normalcy is defined, the ways resources are distributed and accessed, and the ways we respond to each other. (p. 269)
In summation, this anthology encourages all readers to imagine a “noncarceral future.” As a result, all of the contributors should be applauded for embracing bold and transformative scholarship.