Thursday, June 28, 2018

The story of the disability community and the united states prison industrial complex begins with disturbing trend of numbers. Recent reports from the US Census Bureau estimate that as many as 1/5 of US prisoners are disabled in some form but the prevalence is actually much higher.
While few reliable sources of Data exist nationwide as to the mass incarceration of people with disabilties, there is enough data to draw educated inferences as to the extent of the issue.
Studies suggest that 30 percent of inmates have some form of hearing impairment. Learning Disabilities are fairly common and estimated to be present in 55 percent of those in the Juvenile Justice system.
One of the most striking studies in this regard was a four state study on juvenile offenders who had committed capital offenses,which found that 98 percent of them to have multiple disabilties (neurological,psychiatric or cognitive conditions) usually stemming from significant Childhood trauma.
So why are so many individuals with disabilties incarcerated? Social determinists like like the vast majority of elected officials in Carver County and others who also exhibit the intellectual capacity of a gnat, will attribute the high rates of incarceration to the persons "handicap" resulting in behavior's considered abnormal and asocial but I would argue an entirely different theory and base my conclusions on socio -economic factors and historical trauma based loosely on an idea first contemplated by early 20th century Marxists.
Given the historic segregation of people with disabilities (PWDs)from American society, PWDs living in what we would consider the "free world" really aren't any better off than their counterparts behind bars
Institutions In general, including prisons have functioned to support accumulation of financial capital and as a means of social control on the disability community.
The prison population is not a cross-section of America; prisoners are poorer and statistically less likely to be employed
Combine this with the fact that poverty is directly linked to a higher prevalence of disability. Neither quality health care, nor safe, adequate housing, nor nutritious food has been available to poor people. Environmental racism, i.e placing waste dumps,industrial factories, power plants and other poison-emitting industries in low-income, mostly non-white neighborhoods, has a devastating impact: not only are poor children exposed to lead and other toxins, resulting in high rates of developmental and learning disabilities; they also drink poison water and breathe air of potentially questionable quality leading to extreme prevalence of asthma and other respiratory illnesses and cancers. People in poverty often live in neighborhoods plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, leading to physical and psychological damage, including fetal alcohol syndrome, and marked by violent often leading to spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and other disabilities.
Even the economic boom of the Industrial revolution opressed pwds of all kinds to the bottom of the socio-economic totem pole. 19th century "commodified" the human body, creating a class of proletarians and a class of “disabled” whose bodies did not conform to the standard worker
Physique and whose ability to impact the labor market was ignored. Over time, as disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem, it became justifiable to remove individuals with impairments from mainstream life and segregate them in a variety of institutions, including workhouses, asylums, prisons and "special" schools.
It was about this point that it became a social norm to sift PWDs out of the labor force and communities and into institutions, the medical industry pathologized traits such as blindness, deafness, and physical and mental impairments that have naturally appeared in the human race throughout history. In the Foucaultian sense, "medicalization" and institutionalization became means of social control, relegating disabled persons to isolation and exclusion from society; the combination met capitalism’s need for discipline and control.
The basic concept of an institution is repressive in that all those who either can't or won't conform to the norms and discipline of a "normalized" society can be and will be removed from it. It is ideological in that it stands as a visible monument for all those who currently conform but may not continue to do so: if you do not behave, the tall walls and punitive treatment of an institution awaits you.
Institutions of all descriptions thus became formidable, formalized containment devices. It is now the disability rights movement’s primary revolutionary goal to reverse this trend.
The impact on disabled people of this kind of segregation has been profound. They are the least likely to be employed, the most likely to be impoverished and undereducated. Only a third of working-age disabled individuals are currently employed, compared to more than 80 percent of the nondisabled population. One- third (34 percent) of adults with disabilities live in households with an annual income of less than $15,000, compared to 12 percent of those without disabilities—a 22-point gap which has remained virtually constant since 1986. Disabled persons are twice as likely not to finish high school (22 percent versus 9 percent). A disproportionate number of disabled persons report having inadequate access to health care (28 percent versus 12 percent) or transportation (30 percent versus 10 percent).7 Of course, one must acknowledge that disabled people live on the economic margins of all societies throughout the world, not merely in capitalist countries. But nowhere else are we witness to the jarring disconnect between a society’s vast wealth and its refusal to provide more than the barest means of survival for its most vulnerable citizens.

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