This piece reflects on some resonances between Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability, suggesting that they are part of a shared political and intellectual project that a) interrogates common sense practices of penalty and disability care through an interlocking oppression lens centring colonialism, racism, disability, and capitalism, and b) helps us to question the lines between violence and nonviolence in response to distress and disability

Chapman, Chris

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University of Kent Open Access Journals

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________feminists@law Vol 12, No 1 (2023)Working together against the criminal justice system, forcedtreatment, interlocking oppression, and common sense: Disability,Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating DisabilityChris Chapman* AbstractThis piece reflects on some resonances between Disability, Criminal Justice and Law andDecarcerating Disability, suggesting that they are part of a shared political and intellectualproject that a) interrogates common sense practices of penalty and disability care throughan interlocking oppression lens centring colonialism, racism, disability, and capitalism, andb) helps us to question the lines between violence and nonviolence in response to distressand disability.I would like to start with a personal story – the story of first meeting Liat Ben-Moshe, at least as I remember it: We were both attending a Society for Disability Studies conference,which must have been 2008 in New York City. I attended her talk because her topic soundedincredible, and I asked some question of her. Later she came to my paper and after I wasdone, she came up to me and said, “I know why you’re interested in my work. It’s becausewe’re doing the same thing!”This was a little baffling to me, because she was discussing things I’d honestly neverconsidered: the relationship between deinstitutionalization and prison abolition activism.And she was doing so by intersecting anti-Black racism analysis with disability studies. Mypaper had an unruly title of 26 words and was about a residential treatment centre in which* School of Social Work, York University, Canada chap@yorku.ca1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Chris Chapman Working together against the criminal justice systemI worked, trying to make sense of how legacies of eugenics and Indian Residential Schoolscame together in my work with disabled Indigenous children in micro-practices like teaching“pro-social skills” – drawing primarily on anticolonial Indigenous analyses and disabilitystudies (later published as Chapman 2012). Our projects were hardly the same, at first blush, but Ben-Moshe was right that we were both chipping away at a larger political andintellectual project to better understand and challenge the institutions that we live withtoday that can’t be made sense of fully without an interlocking oppression analysis. And I think that’s what enabled our subsequent edited collection with Allison Carey DisabilityIncarcerated (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014) - a book exploring various ways that practices and sites of confinement interlock with disability oppression, colonialism, racism,and capitalism - to be and do what it is and does – or at least what it was and did in thehistorical moment of 2014. In conversation last summer, Ben-Moshe described DisabilityIncarcerated as now an “artefact,” given the incredible amount of activist and scholarlyenergies that have gone into that larger political and intellectual project since that time,especially under the (sometimes overlapping) banners of Disability Justice and Black LivesMatter organizing. We certainly weren’t the first, and we most certainly weren’t the most important artefact in that ongoing trajectory of struggle, but I think we contributedsomething that made a difference to the extent that projects like scholarly editedcollections can do so.Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada (Fritsch, Monaghan, andvan der Meulen 2022) is another edited collection with a wide array of chapters that coverarenas and theorizes well beyond what was done in Disability Incarcerated. Ben-Moshewrote the final chapter (Ben-Moshe 2022), and I had the great privilege of reading it beforeit was released. This book is an excellent collection that in some ways does work that Disability Incarcerated couldn’t yet do in 2014, thanks to eight years of activism andscholarship that pushed what was possible to do and say and imagine. All of that is anintroduction to me saying that I believe that Decarcerating Disability and Disability, CriminalJustice and Law also “do the same thing” and are part of this much larger political andintellectual project – as can also be said of Disability Injustice. 2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________feminists@law Vol 12, No 1 (2023)Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability are very different projects in many ways. Linda Steele’s book brilliantly explores court diversion as a means ofincreasing the carceral control of people’s lives – particularly poor, racialized or Indigenous,disabled people’s lives; Ben-Moshe’s just as brilliantly explores the relationship betweenprison abolition and deinstitutionalization – focusing on anti-carceral activism and counter-organizing. These are hardly the same thing. But both are attempting to trace out how race,colonialism, disability, and class create and restrict possibilities for life and means ofunderstanding, accepting, imagining, and critically engaging. They are very much part of thesame larger project. They both ask us to deeply question things that tend to be taken forgranted; they both argue that the changes we need are much more far-reaching than simplereforms.In the panel on their books at the Law and Society Association last year in which I participated, someone (maybe me) said that both books use a Foucauldian analysis(meaning one based partly on the work of Michel Foucault; although it might be moreaccurate to say that they both do so in the tradition of Jasbir Puar’s (2017) reiteration of a Foucauldian analysis, as well as other recent work that centres the relationship betweendisability oppression and racism, such as that of Nirmala Erevelles (2011), Rachel Gorman(2013), Ameil Joseph (2015), and Louise Tam (2013)). At any rate, during the panel someonesaid, “Foucauldian analysis” and the closed-captioning captured the phrase as “accordionanalysis” – hilarious, maybe, but this enabled me to ad lib one of the things that I most appreciate about these two important and wonderful books. In the first volume of TheHistory of Sexuality, Foucault describes what he calls his method and includes what he calls“the rule of double conditioning” (Foucault 1990, 99). According to this “rule,” micro-practices shape large-scale societal structures and discourses at the very same time that large-scale societal structures and discourses shape micro-interactions and even thoughtsand feelings. We squeeze the accordion to look at how the large scale (partly) determinesaction, thought, interaction and so on; and then we pull it apart to explore how the micro-level cumulatively shapes the macro. Back and forth, taking both equally seriously, we makethe music of critical analysis. The “accordion analysis” that Ben-Moshe and Steele both doso seamlessly is the tracing of this rule of double-conditioning: they move from the very3                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Chris Chapman Working together against the criminal justice systemlocal and specific – whether a specific person’s experience of court diversion or a specificcommunity’s mobilization around deinstitutionalization – to the broad-scale socio-economic, settler colonial, white supremacist, disablist, cisheteropatriarchal, and capitalist structures and discourses that both shape the local and specific and are cumulatively andforever shaped and reshaped by so many locals and specifics.For me, this is essential. Many years ago now, I was actively involved in anti-capitalist/ anti-globalization street protests and I was also working therapeutically with menwho perpetrated violence against their female partners. I wondered about how people inthe IMF or World Bank could sleep at night; I wondered whether their strategies for being at ease with what they did might be similar to those of the men I was working with; I wondered if, like many of the men I worked with, they might have glimmers of shame, self-doubt, and responsibility-taking that usually didn’t go very far but had some potential totake them elsewhere. I wondered if there might be a relationship between individual“ethics” and feelings and the kinds of interactions that might help someone take theirglimpses of accountability seriously, on the one hand, and possibilities for large-scalesocietal transformation, on the other. I wondered about “accordion analysis”, or the rule ofdouble conditioning, without having the language at the time to quite realize it.These two books can help us to find the language to realize how important the“personal is political” is to both changing our world fundamentally and living our most lovingand nonviolent lives. They accordion between the “big P” Political and the interactional,legal, or bureaucratic.They also both ask us to deeply critically engage with what might seem like goodnessor benevolence or progress, as I hope some of my work also invites of readers (Chapman2014; Chapman and Withers 2019). Disability, Criminal Justice and Law explicitly andcentrally does this by upending the commonsense in which diverting criminal penaltytoward (nonvoluntary) treatment and surveillance increases a person’s possibilities for lifeand freedom. Decarcerating Disability does so, for example, in its interrogation of “mentalhealth treatment” in prisons. And I too have tried to demonstrate ways that professionalcare, treatment, and support – especially when nonvoluntary – are very often experienced4                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________feminists@law Vol 12, No 1 (2023)as violence, denigration, and oppression by those subjected to them. Perhaps it’s anotherway that it might be said that we’re doing “the same thing” – or at least that we’re part of a much larger and very diverse common project.Thinking with that resonance across these books, I’d like to end with a question: howmight Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability both help us torespond to the well-intentioned notion that police responses to crisis might be fruitfully andnon-violently replaced by social work or mental health professional responses? What arethe dangers in assuming that one is violent and the other is not – or even is less violent byvirtue of the respondent presumably not being armed? If the aim is to eliminate violenceand oppression, are helping professionals a good enough alternative to policing andprisons?ReferencesBen-Moshe, Liat. 2022. “Refuting Carceral Logics and their Alternatives: Toward Noncarceral(Disability) Futures.” In Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada, editedby Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen, 304-329. Vancouver: UBCPress.Ben-Moshe, Liat, Chris Chapman, & Allison C. Carey (Eds). 2014. Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. New York: PalgraveMacmillan.Chapman, Chris. 2014. “Becoming Perpetrator: How I Came to Accept Restraining andConfining Disabled Aboriginal Children.” In Psychiatry Disrupted: Theorizing Resistanceand Crafting the (R)evolution, edited by Bonnie Burstow, Brenda LeFrançois, and ShaindlDiamond, 16-33. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Chapman, Chris. 2012. “Colonialism, Disability, and Possible Lives: The ResidentialTreatment of Children Whose Parents Survived Indian Residential Schools.” Journal of Progressive Human Services, 24(2): 127-158.5                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Chris Chapman Working together against the criminal justice systemChapman, Chris, and A.J. Withers. 2019. A Violent History of Benevolence: InterlockingOppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working. Toronto: University of TorontoPress.Erevelles, Nirmala. 2011. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling aTransformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.Fritsch, Kelly, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen. 2022. Disability Injustice:Confronting Criminalization in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.Gorman, Rachel. 2013. “Mad Nation? Thinking through Race, Class, and Mad IdentityPolitics.” In Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, edited by Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume, 269-280. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’Press.Joseph, Ameil. 2015. Deportation and the Conflience of Violence within Forensic MentalHealth and Immigration Systems. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke UniversityPress.Tam, Louise. 2013. “Whither Indigenizing the Mad Movement? Social Relations of Race andMadness through Conviviality.” In Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian MadStudies, edited by Brenda LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume, 281-297.Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.6

Working Together against the Criminal Justice System, Forced Treatment, Interlocking Oppression, and Common Sense: Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability

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Working Together against the Criminal Justice System, Forced Treatment, Interlocking Oppression, and Common Sense: Disability, Criminal Justice and Law and Decarcerating Disability

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