Criminalizing Disability
It can be illegal to need help!
This column is about the intersection of my twin interests, criminal justice and disability. It is going to be a very good time.
The intersection of criminalization and disability is visible, with story after story of police arresting, tasing, harassing disabled people. The most recent major story involved a man with speech and motor issues trying to pay for something in the self-checkout aisle with single bills, crumpled up. The police were called to deal with him. The more he tried to explain himself, the more aggressive the cop became. He was clearly paying for his items.
The stats are well known. Disabled people comprise about half of all police killings. Not too long ago, I saw video of policing shooting a man with no legs who was hopping away from them.
When I mentioned these stats to a friend, he asked, “But you have to look at maybe disabled people are committing more crimes.” No, friend, disabled people are not committing half of violent crimes and deservedly being killed for it by police.
So there’s that very visible history of police abusing disabled people. There’s also the visible history of ugly laws, which forbade unpleasant-seeming people from existing in public, and their corollaries in vagrancy laws today. That history shows up in that New Mexico story.
There is the very visible story of how Britney Spears became a prisoner in her own life based on a judge ruling that she lacked capacity to manage herself. Her story is part of the history of the institutionalization of women who resisted patriarchy or, say, had heavy periods.
Speaking of criminalizing disability, we are on the verge of a period in which masking—protecting oneself from still-deadly circulating pathogens—will be criminalized. Someone was forced to remove their mask on transit in the Bay Area recently by police. The Mayor Of New York suggested stores not let in people with masks. Masks are being associated with lack of public safety. A Law and Order episode based a story around a killer that nobody could identify because of a “Covid mask.”
(When the Biden administration suddenly and conspicuously shifted towards anti-mask rhetoric, some of us wondered if it was all about the business of facial recognition software. It was about something! All of a sudden, state officials were calling masks a “Scarlett Letter,” and that was before everyone stopped wearing them!)
Anyway, masks have been illegal in many states in the U.S. for years before Covid because of their association with crime. This, while several other countries in the world learned to adapt to regular mask wearing for disease control. Not every country is quite as obsessed as ours with making social and physical difference illegal.
More and more jobs will not let their staffers wear masks, which is penalizing if not criminalizing. Lots of jobs penalize people for being disabled, by the way. “Not allowed at work” is one way this country criminalizes a lot of behavior without bringing in the police—though sometimes jobs bring in the police.
So these are all ways in which intersection between criminality and disability are visible—the ties that bind police brutality to Britney Spears to fast food corporations.
But I also see this intersection somewhere far into the distance. I see a place where disability and criminality overlap in a small circle, where they are part of the same whole. Bear with me!
All marginalization leads to disability, as activist Imani Barbarin explains in her Tik Tok videos on the subject. Racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. are enmeshed in ideas of inferior and inappropriate bodies, which is ableism by definition. Forced institutionalization and sterilization in the name of disability has been a tool to manage racial, sexual, and other social difference. If you squint, you can see the intersection clearly.
The landscape of criminal justice advocacy has major blind spots around disability, which is partly why I wanted to write this column. When I discuss disability with many people I know involved in criminal justice advocacy, they often glaze over, seem confused, or tell me that asking people to mask is a form of “policing” behavior.
Many criminal justice advocates don’t realize how fundamental disability justice is to criminal justice advocacy—simply, how many people are in prison because they are disabled. More complexly, they don’t realize how many laws are just a way to criminalize disability. Look at the drug wars! Or, if they realize this, they may think the problem would be solved by abolition alone.
There is, conversely, a racism issue within disability justice circles, where wealthy and/or white disabled people may not realize that the criminalization of disability is a big part of criminalization in general and a reason to advocate around the criminal justice system.
If we spin it around, though, disabled people are more likely than others to be victims of crimes. Police can be a threat, but fantasies of mutual aid and restorative justice don’t always land for disabled people, both young and elderly, who have been ostracized and unsupported by their communities, including the vocal mutual aid advocates. I’ve yet to see a simple answer for any topic within disability justice.
A related promotional aside: I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks. It is about the Freddie Gray case, a well-known police brutality case. More than 90 percent of it is about the criminal justice system. It is about the marginalization of eyewitness accounts in place of a police narrative, and the comprehensive ways the criminal justice system protects officers, among other subjects.
Disability is also a lesser subject in the book. Freddie Gray had documented lead paint poisoning, making him one of the disabled half of police victims. But there is both more and less to his disability story than how the media portrayed it. There were also disabled and elderly witnesses who were treated as unreliable, in at least one case explicitly because of disability.
In this space, I will sometimes discuss clear and visible stories where disability and criminalization intersect. I will sometimes discuss stories involving one or the other, where the intersection is less visible. And I might talk about something that feels to me like the criminalization of disability but looks to readers like something else entirely! No guarantees!
Thank you for reading, subscribing, and perhaps taking a look at my new book.
You can find previous criminal justice and disability writings at my website and also my former blog, which was mostly on Baltimore crime and corruption.