Disability Incarcerated

Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada

L. Ben-Moshe, C. Chapman, A. Carey, L. Ben-Moshe, C. Chapman, A. Carey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137404053, 9781137393234
• eBook ISBN: 9781137388476
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Disability Incarcerated gathers thirteen contributions from an impressive array of fields. Taken together, these essays assert that a complex understanding of disability is crucial to an understanding of incarceration, and that we must expand what has come to be called 'incarceration.' The chapters in this book examine a host of sites, such as prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, special education, detention centers, and group homes; explore why various sites should be understood as incarceration; and discuss the causes and effects of these sites historically and currently. This volume includes a preface by Professor Angela Y. Davis and an afterword by Professor Robert McRuer.

I

Interlocking Histories and Legacies of Confinement

1

Reconsidering Confinement: Interlocking Locations and Logics of Incarceration

Chris Chapman, Allison C. Carey, and Liat Ben-Moshe

Through this collection, we hope to engage in and inspire dialogue across people interested in imprisonment, institutionalization, and other sites of incarceration and segregation. Disability is of course a central component to our discussion as we consider how these sites uniquely and collectively shape the experiences of disabled people and how disability as a concept undergirds the development and workings of incarcerative systems. Because the work in this book crosses fields, examines multiple sites of incarceration, and attends to the interlocking of oppression, this chapter is designed to provide a broad historical and theoretical overview in order to showcase the intersections across sites and forms of inequality.

Undifferentiated Confinement and Its Early Critique

In disability scholarship, the rise and fall of the medical institution dominates the historical and theoretical landscape. One thing so compelling about histories of the medical institution is imagining that life was possible before it, which wears away its normative self-evidence. Indeed, just as there was a time before the medical institution, before eighteenth-century Europe and North America, there was a time when imprisonment had never been used anywhere as a primary form of punishment. It had been a temporary measure used under specific circumstances—often when the duration served a specific end, such as awaiting trial or being released upon paying a debt (Carrigan 1994; Foucault 1995; Guest 1997; Rothman 1971). Incarceration was not thought to have any benefit to inmates whatsoever, except perhaps deterrence. It was not any more “rehabilitative” than torture, banishment, or paying a fine.

Following traditions from England and France, the confinement of disabled people emerged early in colonial North America. Although social norms placed primary responsibility for dependents upon family, communities also developed formal mechanisms of care and control to handle instances when families would not or could not fulfill their obligations and when social problems such as vagrancy and theft emerged (Katz 1996). Criminalization and class oppression were thus central to the earliest forms of confining disabled (and nondisabled) people. One of the earliest institutions was the almshouse or poorhouse, which housed poor, disabled, widowed, orphaned, and sick people, in a relatively undifferentiated manner. In practice, early jails, poorhouses, and even “general hospitals,” confined the same undifferentiated populations together. The only common theme was poverty because nobody with other options chose to live in any of these spaces. Wealthy people who were sick would never stay in a hospital, which was understood as a place of contagion rather than cure (Foucault 1994a); wealthy people were also less likely than today to be incarcerated for crimes, given that those jailed were most often sentenced for outstanding debts (Carrigan 1994; Guest 1997); and families with money were unlikely to institutionalize disabled loved ones until doing so became socially sanctioned.

People of color were rarely held in the earliest incarcerative sites, but for different reasons. It was not that racialized people had additional options from which they freely chose alternatives to confinement; rather, the ruling classes had other options for the control and elimination of racialized people. At this time, unrestrained violence was normatively and unapologetically used against enslaved and colonized peoples. Yet, except for this one significant exception, the earliest confinements housed the various populations that are still overrepresented among those incarcerated and institutionalized today (Chapman this volume).

These earliest imprisonments were contradictory in their orientation toward “care” and punishment, as are their descendants today. Supporters of the almshouse claimed that a formal system of institutional care would provide the worthy poor (those perceived as unfit for paid employment such as people with intellectual disabilities and the aged) with superior care, while deterring the unworthy poor (those who “could” work) from needless dependence and idleness. These two goals proved inherently contradictory (Ferguson 1994; Guest 1997). According to Ferguson (1994), in order to deter the unworthy poor, conditions in almshouses had to be sufficiently inhumane and abusive to motivate anyone who could work to do so, making compassionate care of the worthy poor impossible. Thus, abusive custodialism emerged as the accepted means of “caring” for disabled people. Furthermore, new laws against vagrancy and begging criminalized poverty, which increased the vulnerability of disabled people to penal imprisonment (Scheerenberger 1983). Disabled people incarcerated for begging were therefore inseparably confined for being “criminals,” “paupers,” and “disabled.” The three stratifications came together in these new laws and earliest practices of segregating particular people away from “respectable society.”

While it is well documented that the poorhouse was a catchall for all deemed dependent, unproductive or dangerous, it seems to be less often noted that this was equally true of early county jails and hospitals. Foucault (1988, 38) writes that French practices of mass incarceration began in 1657 with the creation of the “general hospital” and the “great confinement of the poor.” Before long, one out of every hundred Parisians was incarcerated. Even after the differentiation of various confined groups had begun, due to efforts of reformers, the “treatment” of people in differentiated sites continued to be rationalized and practiced in ways understood as interrelated. This demands an interlocking analysis of them. For example, the National Conference on Charities and Corrections, founded in 1874 after confinement had become differentiated, was the leading authority on pauperism, insanity, delinquency, prisons, immigration, and feeblemindedness, because they were seen as so closely related (Trent 1994). In many ways, the only thing connecting the diverse populations who were first clustered together in the almshouse is that they have consistently been clustered together ever since, as the responsibility of sites of confinement, professional intervention in the community, or both.

Differentiated Confinement, Resonant Rationalities

The reformed differentiation of sites of confinement led to increased internment of diverse populations. Importantly, though, rather than being an imposition from government or business interests, this increase in confinement at first came largely out of the vigorous advocacy of progressive reformers and the advent of “moral treatment.” In the eighteenth century, Pinel in France and Tuke in England described the then-normative approaches to psychiatric confinement as inhumane. They removed (some) patients’ restraints and attempted to treat them in asylums. American psychiatric hospitals were also founded by progressive religious reformers, such as Dorothea Dix. Like Pinel and Tuke, Dix sought to liberate the “mad” from the oppressive conditions of chains and squalor, and to provide them with therapies—while still confined (Braddock and Parish 2003). Around this same time, the first institutions for blind people and “deaf mutes” also emerged. In 1818, the New York Institution for Deaf and Dumb was established (the American Asylum at Hartford was already operative), and the Perkins School for the Blind was established in Massachusetts in 1832. Dix herself founded a school for the blind, suggesting again that these diverse endeavors were intimately related. They were all oriented by the concern that confinement be specialized. Undifferentiated confinement was now an injustice, but specialized confinement could educate or rehabilitate.

In the United States, penitentiaries were created through the efforts of progressive religious reformers who sought more humane and efficacious forms of punishment than corporal punishments (Foucault 1995). Auburn prison opened in 1817 in Auburn, NY, and Quakers founded the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829. This was considered part of progressive social reform, and was followed in other parts of the United States and Canada in subsequent decades (Carrigan 1994). Early penitentiaries were not only imagined as the lesser of two evils, but they were also an experimental ground for other socially progressive innovations in architecture, hygiene, education, and moral reform (Rothman 1971; 1995).

Various incarcerative and institutional solutions grew in popularity throughout the 1800s (Ferguson 1994; Rothman 1971). By the mid-nineteenth century, systems of “care” were transforming into the more expansive, specialized, medical systems that would dominate the early twentieth century. In terms of political rationality (Chapman this volume; Foucault 1994b, 324–325), it was only in the 1800s that confinement was first conceptualized as doing anything useful for those confined. This was partly a result of developments in technologies of discipline within spaces of confinement (Foucault 1995; 2008), but it also relates to a growing secularization in Christian Europe. This disrupted the belief that people’s lot in life was divinely predestined (Foucault 1994a). Now, for the first time in Christian Europe, it was believed that people could significantly alter the course of their lives. One could not only accrue wealth and status—as was evident in the new bourgeois class—but could also become educated, cultivated, sane, or “civilized” (Chapman this volume).

The idea of individual transformation intersected with the “treatment” of denigrated populations. Both the British New Poor Law and the Bill for the Total Abolition of Colonial Slavery (which abolished slavery in Canada and other British colonies) took effect in 1834, and both were premised on the idea that paupers and slaves could undergo tutelage to ready them for the responsibilities of “economic freedom” (O’Connell 2009). That paupers and Black people could ever handle such responsibilities was a new idea for ruling class Europeans. At this time, prisoners were first subjected to strict routines as a means of developing self-discipline. Faucher’s strict timetable for prisoners, which would not have made sense to anyone a few decades earlier, was published only four years after the British New Poor Law and the Total Abolition of Colonial Slavery (Foucault 1995, 6–7). In the year previous to this timetable, the construction of New York’s Utica State Lunatic Asylum began in 1837, and by the 1850s there were 30 such institutions in the United States (Braddock and Parish 2003). The then Province of Canada built its first “Lunatic Asylum” in Toronto in 1850 (Voronka 2008), which was just four years after the Government had resolved “to fully commit itself to Indian residential schools” in 1846 (Fournier and Crey 1999, 53). And only two years later, in the United States, Hervey Backus Wilbur undertook the first instruction of an intellectually disabled pupil in 1848 (Rafter 1997, 17), after which he became Superintendent of the first American “Asylum for Idiots” in Albany, NY, in 1851. Although there were widely divergent effects on the groups incarcerated in these various settings, which all emerged within a 17-year time span, they loosely share a structure of political rationality: under the right conditions imposed from above, degenerate, disabled, criminalistic, or uncivilized peoples can be brought “up” to normative standards. Theoretically, any person was now capable of achieving normalcy. This may sound like a welcome development, but it offered a very narrow conception of normalcy, and everyone was now measured against it, which was never previously the case (L. Davis 1995). Anything outside this narrow conception still required elimination, but such elimination could now be achieved by transforming individuals. As US Indian Commissioner William Jones put it, the goal of Indian Residential Schools was to “exterminate the Indian but develop a man” (in Churchill 2004, 14).

Furthermore, such previously impossible “development”—whether of slaves, First Nations, paupers, criminals, or intellectually, physically or psychiatrically disabled people—aimed toward integration into society as menial laborers. Residential Schools, penitentiaries, and the various specialized schools and institutions for disabled people never oriented their efforts toward graduates who would be leaders or professionals. The secular dream that people are masters of their own destiny only extended so far, and it intersected with the capitalist requirement for cheap labor.

Capitalism and Its Interlockings with Disablement and Confinement

Transformations within disability incarceration were propelled by the spread of capitalism, the reliance on institutions to manage social problems, the medicalization of intellectual disability, and the rise of eugenics (Rothman 1971; Trent 1994). Capitalism slowly and fundamentally transformed social norms regarding care, disability, and dependence. Growing capitalist markets required a vast pool of mobile and free workers, and traditional systems of charity were increasingly understood to undermine work ethic and encourage dependence. Reformers advanced distinct agendas for the able-bodied and disabled poor. The able-bodied were to be inculcated with work ethic and “motivated” to work—either by the denial of assistance or the provision of assistance in conditions wretched enough to make paid labor seem attractive. Those incapable of working were provided with custodial care and institutional segregation, but in inhumane conditions that underscored the horror of dependency (Ferguson 1994; Foucault 1988; Scull 1977).

When considering these histories, it should be remembered that some of those who were now “incapable of working” had previously been gainfully employed within more flexible and heterogeneous economic spheres in which requisite tasks and wages were more immediately and intimately negotiated, such as those within families and small communities (Edwards 1997; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). Some of the “non-productive” within industrial capitalism were easily identified, but differentiation based on psychiatric and intellectual disability proved more challenging. Medical, psychological, and educational professionals took on the task of sorting productive from unproductive (or unworthy from worthy) and managing appropriate “treatment.” In reference to resultant practices of confinement, Foucault (1988) wrote: “Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labor” (46). “Cure” was increasingly understood as “readiness for economic freedom,” but this goal was made ever more challenging by a progressively competitive industrial labor market demanding fast-paced and standardized work. As optimism about specialized schools faded, superintendents began to emphasize the cost-effectiveness of institutions for lifelong custodial care (Noll and Trent 2004; Trent 1994).

From 1820–1850 there was also an increase in public concerns about crime as a hazard. Rothman (1995) asserts that this preoccupation with delinquency most likely had more to do with a society in flux than with actual rising rates of crime.¹ Reformers looked to prisons and the medical institution as a remedy for the resultant chaos (Reilly 1991; Rothman 1971). Within the walls of the institution or penitentiary, experts could create an environment that exemplified the principles of a well-ordered society and thereby (it was believed) cure inmates of insanity, deficiency, and deviancy. This occurred alongside the creation of the closed institutional spaces of Indian Residential Schools, which were politically rationalized as a means of “saving” the children from the “death of their race” (as a result of the social chaos resulting from colonialism, but narrated as social Darwinism)—which was considered inevitable by most White people at the time (Kelm 2005; King 2003; Neu and Therrien 2003).

Confinement’s particularity was always contingent on interlocking power relations. The first institutions were marked by internal stratification, keeping the poor separate from privileged classes (Braddock and Parish 2003; Smith and Giggs 1988); while some wealthy families were able to pay for relatively comfortable institutional care for their loved ones, families with more moderate incomes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I Interlocking Histories and Legacies of Confinement
• Part II Interlocking Oppressions, Contemporary Lockdown, and Contested Futures
• Epilogue: Disability, Inc.
• Appendix: Insanity and Terrorism
• Notes on Contributors
• Index