Decarcerating Disability
Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition
Liat Ben-Moshe
FINALIST: American Studies Association — Lora Romero First Book Prize
FINALIST: Society for the Study of Social Problems — C. Wright Mills Book Award
HONORABLE MENTION: National Women Studies Association — Alison Piepmeier Book Prize
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BOOK DISCUSSION GUIDE
VIDEO DISCUSSION: LIAT BEN-MOSHE, ERICA MEINERS, AND DEAN SPADE
This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration
Liat Ben-Moshe provides case studies that show how prison abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Her analysis of lived experience, history, and culture charts a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
"Decarcerating Disability is a groundbreaking feminist study of the affinities, interrelations, and contradictions between prison abolition and psychiatric deinstitutionalization. Emphasizing the need for a more expansive field of critical carceral studies, Liat Ben-Moshe compellingly demonstrates the important lessons we can discover through serious engagements with radical disability movements. Scholars and activists alike should read this book without delay!"
—Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.
Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.
Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
Awards
National Women Studies Association — Alison Piepmeier Book Prize – Honorable Mention
Society for the Study of Social Problems — C. Wright Mills Book Award – Finalist
American Studies Association — Lora Romero First Book Prize – Finalist
$30.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0443-2
$120.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0442-5
366 pages, 4 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, May 2020
Liat Ben-Moshe is assistant professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is coeditor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada.
Decarcerating Disability is a groundbreaking feminist study of the affinities, interrelations, and contradictions between prison abolition and psychiatric deinstitutionalization. Emphasizing the need for a more expansive field of critical carceral studies, Liat Ben-Moshe compellingly demonstrates the important lessons we can discover through serious engagements with radical disability movements. Scholars and activists alike should read this book without delay!
Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe carefully and incisively models an intersectional approach to abolition grounded in feminist, queer, and crip of color critique. Moving beyond demands for inclusion and critiques of overrepresentation, Ben-Moshe makes a powerful and persuasive case for a disability studies that recognizes state violence as central to its work and the carceral industrial complex as a site for queer coalitions for racial and disability justice. In so doing, she paves the way for thinking not only disability and disability studies differently, but also liberation itself.
Alison Kafer, University of Texas at Austin
Decarcerating Disability is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and dismantling the interlocking systems of incarceration that shape the contemporary political landscape and shorten so many lives. Liat Ben-Moshe shows how the effectiveness of abolitionist work has been limited by the marginalization of disability and anti-sanism analysis and advocacy. She not only exposes how much contemporary abolitionists have to learn from historical struggles for deinstitutionalization, she also demonstrates a more truly intersectional method of abolitionist scholar-activism that we urgently need. This book is both a corrective intervention and a path-breaking tool for developing better strategy toward the world that those who seek liberation are fighting to build.
Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law
Ben-Moshe outlines how people fought for a new paradigm in mental health treatment before. Beginning in the 1960s, widespread deinstitutionalization sparked by disability activists shut down asylums across the country. Many see this movement now as a failure because it led to more people with mental illness being herded into jails and prisons. But Ben-Moshe argues that this was a pivotal step in abolition by grassroots organizing.
Teen Vogue
Examining decarceration and deinstitutionalisation within the same frame is vitally important...the book challenges us to think about the range of carceral facilities that exist.
Race & Class
A groundbreaking connection between disability justice and prison abolition.
Public Books
Decarcerating Disability should be read not only by students and scholars of African-American studies, criminology, critical theory, gender studies, law, or sociology, nor only by policy makers, but by all who are concerned about disability, gender, or racial justice.
American Journal of Sociology
Each chapter of Decarcerating Disability serves as a fantastic example of the knowledges, perspectives, and genealogies that are made possible when disability and madness are the lenses through which a queer of color critique is engaged.
Disability Studies Quarterly
Decarcerating Disability is an impressive text that powerfully argues for robust coalitional politics to challenge the logic of incarceration. Entire syllabi and reading groups can be structured around this text as Ben-Moshe opens up much to consider, especially how to effectively demand carceral-free futures, while also valuing disability.
Ethnic Studies Review
Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition is a
bold and challenging critical intervention, which puts critical disability studies, deinstitutionalisation, decarceration, and abolition theory and scholarship into closer conversation with each other. In so doing, the book has pushed these fields forward in new and, interesting ways. The book’s strongest contribution is its attempt to transform, redefine, and reframe what disability studies is and can be about, its appeal to frame and address issues of incarceration and decarceration as disability and carceral abolition issues, and the generative groundwork laid for fostering coalitional, liberatory politics and ideas.
Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology
[A]n important book that offers both a sweeping genealogy of disability and its
entangled history with race and incarceration, and rallying cry for abolitionism.
Journal of Constructivist Psychology
Ben-Moshe offers a detailed history of institutionalization and incarceration primarily in the United States. In putting institutionalization and incarceration in conversation, Ben-Moshe offers a larger consideration around the systems that keep certain individuals enclosed and the implications of deinstitutionalization as a movement versus louder for total prison abolition. A major intervention of Ben-Moshe’s book is the different approaches to and opinions of institutions as opposed to prison systems across the United States.
Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
Ben-Moshe articulates responses to many of the common questions that abolitionists face, including: what to do about interpersonal or community safety; are non-carceral solutions practicable; why are certain people and behaviors criminalized; and, in the words of Angela Davis, what kind of “social landscape” would non-carcerality necessitate and entail.
Rampant Magazine
The objectives and contributions of this book are multiple and complex, making for an impressive project... Ben-Moshe’s book delivers on the ambitious goals she charts in the introduction.
E3W Ethnic and Third World Literatures
The book contributes a wealth of important insights and will be of interest to a broad audience from such disciplines as criminology, law, justice, and history.
H-Disability
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Case for Intersecting Disability, Imprisonment, and Deinstitutionalization
1. The Perfect Storm: Origin Stories of Deinstitutionalization
2. Abolition in Deinstitutionalization: Normalization and the Myth of Mental Illness
3. Abolition as Knowledge and Ways of Unknowing
4. Why Prisons Are Not “the New Asylums”
5. Resistance to Inclusion and Community Living: NIMBY, Desegregation, and Race-Ability
6. Political and Affective Economies of Closing Carceral Enclosures
7. Decarcerating through the Courts: Past, Present, and Future of Institutional and Prison Litigation
Epilogue: Abolition Now
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Decarcerating Disability is also available as an audiobook.
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Related News & Events
Flash Forward Podcast: "Could Mind Control End Crime?" with Liat Ben-Moshe
Ideas on Fire: Imagine Otherwise: Liat Ben-Moshe on Community beyond the Carceral State
Liat Ben-Moshe featured on New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Flash Forward Podcast: "Could Mind Control End Crime?" with Liat Ben-Moshe
Liat Ben-Moshe, author of DECARCERATING DISABILITY, joins the Flash Forward podcast for a discussion of a future where we start putting devices in people's brains to reduce crime.
Ideas on Fire: Imagine Otherwise: Liat Ben-Moshe on Community beyond the Carceral State
On episode 134 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Liat Ben-Moshe, who has spent her career tracing what she calls carceral ableism, or the ways the prison industrial complex and anti-disability logics shape one another in our daily lives and our political institutions.
Liat Ben-Moshe featured on New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
Liat Ben-Moshe on Rising Up With Sonali
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently voted unanimously to close the notorious LA Men’s Central Jail – part of the largest jail system in the country that prison abolition activists have often dubbed the nation’s largest psychiatric ward. A whopping 20% of inmates have struggled with mental illness in what may be the strongest indication of the intersection of disability and incarceration. Now a new book tackles how the discourse on mass incarceration needs to be centered on disability.
Rustbelt Abolition Radio: "What do we mean by abolition?" with Liat Ben-Moshe
If the aim of abolition is to make all space free and non-exclusive, with no boundary or border that would keep somebody in or keep somebody out, how do we reconcile that with a common sense impulse to move people out of prisons and into mental health facilities? Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo and a scholar-activist who works in the intersection of prison abolition, anti-psychiatry, de-institutionalization, and disability justice. She is co-editor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. I spoke with Dr. Ben-Moshe about the abolitionary mindset, and asked: what does this mindset lead us to question?
Teen Vogue: What Defunding Police Means for Mental Health Care
Conversations about defunding police miss how our mental health infrastructure can mirror the prison system.
Truthout: Reviving the Asylum Is Not the Answer to Gun Violence
It is this oppression of psychiatrized people that undergirds the current call for their incarceration in asylums. In this era of law-and-order politics, custodial mental institutions are viewed as legitimate and appropriate rather than as a form of state-sponsored violence.
Public Books: Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice
Charting the history and genealogy of the deinstitutionalization movement—which saw, over two waves through the 1950s and ’60s, almost half a million patients transferred from state-run institutions to community mental-health centers—Ben-Moshe draws lessons for the prison abolitionist movement, showing that abolition is a realistic goal with precedent in disability activism.
Demos Journal: Why the fight against racism and ableism must be shared
I am learning, through Ben-Moshe’s genealogy of carceral locales in Decarcerating Disability, that the idea of ableism is political in itself.
H-Net Disability: "The book contributes a wealth of important insights"
Ben-Moshe raises powerful questions about the links between neoliberalism and institutions, noting, for instance, that homecare has never been as profitable as institutions that employ people, attract funding, and generate income. The author raises related points about the devaluing of women’s work in providing domestic care, and she has much to say about race relations, noting that the addition of “danger” to the list of criteria for hospitalization increased the likelihood of color becoming institutionalized. Ultimately, Decarcerating Disability concludes that simply abolishing institutions is not the solution. Instead, we need to entirely do away with the broader neoliberal discourses that support imprisonment and learn to embrace, rather than shut away, vulnerability.
E3W: "Ben-Moshe's book delivers on ambitious goals"
The objectives and contributions of this book are multiple and complex, making for an impressive project spanning the range of an introduction, seven chapters, and epilogue.
Black Agenda Report Book Forum with Liat Ben-Moshe
I hope that disability rights movements understand how pathologization is deeply connected to racialization, criminalization and white supremacy. I hope that this unlearning leads to more intersectional analysis and struggles for liberation.