Decarcerating Disability Quotes

“Abolitionist knowledge reconceptualizes notions like “crime” or “innocence” (what gets to be defined as crime, and who gets defined as criminal); disability or madness (as an identity and politics, not only a medical diagnosis) and rehabilitation (which is seen as a form of assimilation and normalization, not just as benign “treatment”); ideas of punishment (transformative justice vs. revenge or retribution); notions of freedom and equality (whether we can feel free and safe without locking others away); and, on the other hand, concepts of danger and protection (Whom do we protect by segregating people behind bars in psychiatric hospitals and prisons? Is it for “their own good”?).”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“The costs of not being integrated correctly (and I am using corrections here deliberately) are the veiled threats and often realities of institutionalization or returning to segregated congregate living (for those who were deinstitutionalized). There is always the shadow of the adverse consequences if one does not conform or comply—what I called elsewhere the institution yet to come.46 The specter of incarceration is inherent, as a promise or threat, in mechanisms of liberal inclusion.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“As Rachel Gorman claims about current-day mad pride organizing, it is hard to decenter whiteness in mad organizing if people of color can’t afford to take up the mad identity, because of a variety of reasons, including already living under surveillance by medico-judicial apparatuses, not having access to mental health care, and the seeming irrelevance of mad movements to the lived experience of racialized and colonized people.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“The push to abolish psychiatry can seem very privileged when some, especially racialized people, gender nonconforming people, poor people, and their intersected oppressions, don’t have access to any meaningful form of mental health care, including psychiatric diagnosis that provides access to other state services (in such avenues as education, employment accommodation, SSDI).”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Historically, Hong argues, neoliberalism emerged as a response to the liberation movements of the post–World War II era: “A new neoliberal order arose based on selective protection and proliferation of minoritized life as the very mechanism for the brutal exacerbation of minoritized death.”149 In other words, protection of some leads to (as opposed to prevents) the devaluation of others in a cruel but seemingly neutral zero-sum game.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“At the same time, mainstream gay activists of the 1970s era who wanted to take out homosexuality as a classificatory category under the DSM saw madness and disability as pathological and did not want to associate with them for fear of medicalization or criminalization. In other words, according to Lewis, declassification activists looked at the diagnosis of homosexuality as an error in an otherwise scientific profession of psychiatry.129 By so doing, declassification activism aided in the legitimation of psychiatry as scientific knowledge, an assertion that was cemented at the end of the 1970s.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Unlike other fields of medicine, Szasz claimed, psychiatry created new criteria for diagnosis of disease: alteration of bodily function instead of bodily form. Now doctors only need to observe behavior to diagnose, not find evidence of lesions or viruses. Therefore, in psychiatry, diseases are invented, not discovered”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“This coupling of erudite (scholarly) knowledges and embodied (popular) knowledge is what Foucault refers to as genealogy.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Foucault’s conceptualization of genealogy, which is largely about uncovering subjugated, disqualified knowledge. Foucault identifies two elements within this term. First, it is the buried histories that have been subsumed by “formal systemization.”1 It is these excavated “blocks of historical knowledges” that have been obscured that he terms subjugated knowledges. The second meaning of subjugated knowledges, besides being buried, is forms of knowing that had been disqualified, considered nonsensical or nonscientific. It is “the knowledge of the psychiatrized, the patient, the nurse, the doctor, that is parallel to, marginal to, medical knowledge, the knowledge of the delinquent, what I would call, if you like, what people know.”2 By stating that it is the knowledge of what people know, Foucault is not referring to the taken for granted or dominant form of knowledge circulating but localized, particular, specific knowledges, what we might also call marginalized, experiential, or embodied knowledge.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“moral panics around the figure of the mentally ill as dangerous, especially through a racialized and gendered prism: as a lone bad apple, the mentally ill is a white man; as inherently depraved due to group association or background, the terrorist is sick and nonnormative, and also male—what Puar characterized as inherently queer.75 In contrast, the image of the “mentally retarded” is of the eternally innocent, in need of understanding, compassion, education, and specialized treatment.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“The other consequence of the hegemony of biopsychiatry is the hierarchy of disability it created. For psychiatry to become a legitimate profession, let alone a science, a separation was created between those who can be treated (the “mentally ill”) and those labeled as incurable (feebleminded and then intellectually disabled).73 Another way to put this in context is that part of the easy acceptance of the hegemonic story of psychopharmaceuticals leading to deinstitutionalization is the underlying presumption that some form of social control of disability and abnormality is necessary.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“As Bagnall and Eyal contend, the difference in the perception of the two forms of deinstitutionalization was due to different framings of social worth, in which those labeled with I/DD were seen as “forever children” and in need of guardianship, protection, and education, while those with labels of mental illness were constructed as “autonomous citizens.”71 Because mental illness was perceived as an illness and postwar sentiments believed in cure, people with psych labels were seen as self-reliant individuals who were only temporarily in need of assistance.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“contemporary mad activist Erick Fabris contends that the introduction, and enforcement, of psychiatric drugs acted as a form of literal (not figurative) chemical incarceration that enabled populations that were deemed dangerous to live outside of an institution. These forms of chemical incarceration do not signal the liberation of the mad but their increased surveillance by other means—what I have termed carceral sanism.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“But in the hegemonic story of deinstitutionalization, psych drugs were seen as a factor only in the field of mental health and are almost never discussed in the origin story of deinstitutionalization in the field of I/DD. In other words, the use of Thorazine and other psych drugs in I/DD institutions is not perceived as leading to their closure, even though they were widely used.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“A growing industry of privately run nursing homes and board and care facilities began to emerge with the phase-out of the hospitals and in some cases gained a lobby that advocated proactively for closure in order to increase their profits, leading to the modern-day institutional and deinstitutional industrial complex.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“In Disability Servitude, Ruthie-Marie Beckwith shows that one of the major economic causes of accelerated deinstitutionalization was ending the practice of unpaid forced labor in these institutions. This practice, based on lawsuits and enforcing fair labor laws within disability carceral spaces, meant that the cost of maintaining institutions increased after the 1970s.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Limiting institutionalization is an important decarceration strategy, but it still legitimates confinement as just one among other seemingly equal options and as such rationalizes carcerality and neutralizes its logic.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“My broader contention is that the focus on deplorable conditions may have assisted in shaping the public’s view as to the abuses taking place but it did not lead to abolishing these spaces of confinement; instead, it led to calls to reform them, which often aided in prolonging and justifying their existence.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Not everything disability produces is beautiful, but as a productive force, in the Foucauldian sense, disability produces specific sensibilities and discourses. I want to affirm the life that’s already here in the form of the knowledges of disabled and mad people, at the same time as calling to end violent debilitation and the conditions that make them viable. This book therefore understands disability as an (intersectional) optic that deconstructs the normative body/mind and uncovers the radical potential of living otherwise.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“I want also to insist that disability cannot be articulated solely through the lens of pathology. The potential peril of discussing disability solely on the level of the biopolitics of debilitation is that we are left with prevention and assimilation discourses as the only available frameworks that can account for ways of effectively living with disability. The biopolitics of debilitation can’t explain or account for what becomes of/to people on the level of activism or ontology once they are disabled/debilitated.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“This is a shift from the seemingly axiomatic statement about “overrepresentation,” of children of color in special education or of people of color in prisons, to understanding this debilitation and forces of what I call racial criminal pathologization as a core of institutions that uphold settler racial “democracies.” Puar shows that disability under capitalism and empire is not overrepresented, as if this is an unfortunate side effect of these regimes. Rather, it is the core function of the system as is—to incapacitate, punish, contain.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“As Jin Haritaworn implores, “I wish to propose that we further expand our abolitionist imagination by asking how hate is ascribed in tandem with not only crime but also pathology, in ways that defend and expand not only the prison but also psychiatry and other institutions of ‘care’ and reform. In particular, I argue that hate always already emanates from racialised bodies and ‘minds’ in ways that call for their assimilation and segregation in the form of treatment, education, policing, confinement and deportation.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Such intersectional analysis in the field of education, for example, repeatedly demonstrates the overrepresentation of students of color in special education and their labeling in “soft” disability categories such as emotionally disturbed, attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders, and historically also “mental retardation” and now intellectual disability.89 As critical educators Dean Adams and Erica Meiners suggest, classification as special education masks segregation and pathologizes students of color.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“I want to emphasize that at issue here is not just co-optation or privatization but a change in the discourse that incorporates the punitive with the therapeutic, with vast implications for the embeddedness of criminalization with pathologization.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“incarceration is not just a space or locale but a logic of state coercion and segregation of difference.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“I want also to suggest that the disabling nature of incarceration and whose bodies are available for capture should likewise be understood as a core feature of incarceration.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“Deinstitutionalization has been largely defined as the movement of people with psychiatric and intellectual or developmental disabilities from state institutions and hospitals into community living and supports. Deinstitutionalization is also the accompanying closure of carceral locales, the shuttering of large, mostly state-sponsored/funded, institutions and hospitals for people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. But by understanding it as a history of (not only but also) abolitionist practices, I argue that deinstitutionalization is not only a historical process but a logic.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“I argue that deinstitutionalization is not just something that has “happened” but was a call for an ideological shift in the way we react to difference among us.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“First, it ignores the ways carceral locales and their histories of closure and abolition are interconnected. This is what Chapman, Carey, and I referred to as “carceral archipelago” or carceral matrix.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“When disability or madness is present, it is conceived of as a deficit, something in need of correction, medically/psychiatrically or by the correction industry, but not as a nuanced identity from which to understand how to live differently, including reevaluating responses to harm and difference.”
― Liat Ben-moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition