Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. By Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman and Allison C. Carey with a foreword by Angela Y. Davis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 320pp. C$34.50 pb)

Ben-Moshe, Chapman and Carey bring together diverse scholars to explore the experiences, structures and philosophies underpinning the parallels between the practice of incarceration and the concept of disability. Drawing attention to psychiatric illness in particular, an analogy with incarceration sets the fundamental tone of how historical trends alongside the redefining of and society’s perceptions of mental and/or physical disability have created a chaos of interpretation and understanding between what defines disability and what defines incarceration. Situating analyses in the United States and Canada, scholars adopt a critical perspective to highlight how discourses and the evolution of disability impact prisoners’ experiences of incarceration. Authors engage with abolitionist thinking, reissuing the rhetorical question of ‘what do we do with the dangerous few?’ in asking ‘what do we do with the persons who are most severely unable to survive on the outside—the profoundly disabled?’ They challenge the concept and practice of imprisonment by drawing attention to falsities in historical understandings and they reveal the systemic realities that underlie the history of confinement, including institutional discrimination. For example, the belief that the deinstitutionalization of persons in treatment centres increased prison populations is not supported by demographic information that evidences how the prison boom accompanying deinstitutionalization was male and non-white rather than paralleling the demographic composition of the deinstitutionalized population. They contend that closing institutions is not abolition and does not equate to equality or freedom. The question of ‘what’s next’ is then posed, accompanied by many arguments, including that an accessible society is not just about ramps and navigated space—it is not simply a discussion of alternatives—rather it is about changing relationships between one another and changing lives. As Angela Davis eloquent notes in the forward ‘if the radical core of prison abolition is not be scarified on the altar of fiscal responsibility, lessons from the deinstitutionalization movement should be heeded’ (p. vii). The authors advocate that disability and incarceration are interlocking issues, distinct but similar. As such incarceration needs to be viewed with a disability lens and how disability is rooted in the construction of prisoners and prisons, both historically and ideologically, recognized.

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