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Introduction 636 I. Police Surveillance & Excessive Force Against Black Philadelphians 642 A. Surveillance and Over-policing of Black Activists 643 B. PPD's Over-policing and Excessive Use of Force Against Black [...]

Context: The "Crouse" decision from 1838 laid precedent to the positioning of prisons as sites where education takes place. With a massive expansion of youth carceral facilities since then, alongside the prison-schools within them, we continually rely on prison-school spaces as places where youth are brought to experience education and punishment. While the wider population of youth who are incarcerated in the United States has significantly reduced since the year 2000, the reduction of incarcerated Girls of Color has not. Many incarcerated Girls of Color are also disabled. Thus, it is within this context that we explore the prison-school space as a site that is intended to provide robust educational opportunities. Focus of Study: In this article, we repositioned disabled incarcerated Girls of Color as knowledge generators and as experts well positioned to describe existing prison-school practices and alternatives to prison-school. Through the conceptual frames of forgotten places and the destructive practices within, we focused on the lived experiences of disabled incarcerated Girls of Color in SYRAD, a Midwestern maximum-security youth prison, to address our main research question: What are the education experiences of disabled Girls of Color in prison-schools? Research Design: Our qualitative study is part of a larger project that included 14 disabled incarcerated Girls of Color. Throughout the year, the girls were enrolled in a credit-bearing course with the principal investigator and research team. Our full corpus of data included interviews with the girls (23) and adults in the youth prison (6); classroom observations (25); education journey maps (10); focus groups (4); field notes (20); and classroom artifacts (21). For this study, we mainly focused on the initial interviews with the girls in which they discussed topics related to their experiences in a prison and prison-school. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analyses showcased that prison-schools do not offer robust educational opportunities as claimed by the "Crouse" decision. Instead, the collective experiences of disabled incarcerated Girls of Color in our study were saturated with destructive prison-school practices. Three main findings emerged in our analysis that framed prison-school educational spaces as "concentrated sinks" of destructive practices: (1) curricular reduction, (2) remedial pedagogy, and (3) relational antagonism. Further, the girls offered robust explications on why naming and describing destructive practices is important, especially "when you carry a lot" as an incarcerated disabled Girl of Color in a forgotten place of prison-school. These findings led us to the need for an eventual abolition of prisons and prison-school spaces that can be anchored in a "DisCrit abolitionist imaginary" in the meantime.

Over the last five decades, advocates have fought for and secured constitutional prohibitions challenging solitary confinement, including ending the placement and prolonged isolation of individuals with psychiatric disabilities in solitary confinement. Yet, despite the valiant efforts of this courageous movement to protect the rights of incarcerated people with disabilities through litigation, the legal regime protecting the rights of incarcerated people with disabilities reflects a troubling paradigm: ableism.Ableism is a complex system of cultural, political, economic, and social practices that facilitate, construct, or reinforce the subordination of people with disabilities in a given society. In this Essay I argue that current Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in prison conditions of confinement cases in some ways requires lawyers to engage in ableism to protect their clients from harsh and inhumane treatment. The complexity of this arrangement—as between protecting and expanding the rights of people with disabilities and reinforcing practices that facilitate their exclusion and subordination—is both a cause and effect of ableism, particularly in the area of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Though entrenched in our legal institutions, the overrepresentation of people with disabilities in the criminal legal system calls for a new approach to the representation of these individuals. Towards that end, this Essay proposes a series of interventions in both law and professional practice to reduce the reliance on, and effect of, ableism in representing people with disabilities in the prison reform litigation.

Context: Prison education has often been ignored in discussions of public education. When it has been included, Girls of Color are often eclipsed by larger populations of Boys of Color. Yet the routes disabled Girls of Color take to prisons are different from those of their male peers; Girls of Color become incarcerated for low-level offenses and often end up back in prison due to probation violations, meaning they have been punished more severely for original crimes. Although prison education has offered educational opportunities, such as the chance to get a diploma or GED, most of it has been found to be remedial and irrelevant to the lives of incarcerated disabled Girls of Color. Focus of Study: In this article, we unraveled the complexities and nuances of solidarity within prison education classrooms with disabled Girls of Color. Using a disability critical race theory (DisCrit) Solidarity lens while analyzing a sociocritical literacy course, the empirical research question was: What are the affordances and constraints of DisCrit Solidarity with disabled Girls of Color in a youth prison? Research Design: Our qualitative study took place in a maximum-security youth prison in the Midwestern part of the United States. This study was part of a larger one-year project that included 16 incarcerated disabled girls, mostly Girls of Color, who enrolled in a credit-bearing sociocritical literacy course designed and taught by the principal investigator and teaching team. Our full corpus of data included interviews with the girls (23) and adults in the youth prison (6), classroom observations (25), education journey maps (10), focus groups (4), fieldnotes (20), and classroom artifacts (21). Data for this study focused on the interviews with the girls, observations, fieldnotes, and class materials. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis illustrated the affordances and constraints of solidarity in prison classrooms with incarcerated disabled Girls of Color. The affordances included tangible moves that the girls identified as solidarity, the need for solidarity to make critical pedagogy and curriculum impactful, and the effect of those affordances that the girls described. In youth prisons where tools of learning, such as pencils, were considered weapons, we found two constraints that limited DisCrit Solidarity efforts: the conflation of support with solidarity and the violent context of youth prisons. We conclude with the implication that our solidarity efforts were incarcerated. To move beyond narrowly focused solidarity efforts, we suggest growing out abolitionist geography to consider the multiscalar processes that lead to sustained solidarities with incarcerated disabled Girls of Color.

INTRODUCTION 1905 I. DISABILITY FRAMES IN CONDITIONS OF CONFINEMENT LITIGATION 1910 A. Stigmatizing Disability Frames 1912 B. Productive Disability Frames 1916 II. DISABILITY RIGHTS AND DISABILITY JUSTICE MOVEMENTS: FROM PRISON [...]

WE DO THIS 'TIL WE FREE US. By Mariame Kaba. Edited by Tamara K. Nopper. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2021. Pp. xxviii, 197. $16.95. INTRODUCTION During the uprisings that followed the [...]

Table of Contents Introduction I. The Medical Model in Historical and Contemporary Context A. Historical Context B. Contemporary Law-Enforcement Responses to "Disability in Public" 1. Policing in and around hospitals [...], In recent years, there has been increased attention to the problem of police violence against disabled people. Disabled people are overrepresented in police killings and, in a number of cities, police use-of-force incidents. Further, though police violence dominates the discussion of policing, disabled people also disproportionately experience more ordinary forms of policing that can lead to police violence. For example, disabled people, particularly those with untreated psychiatric disabilities, are vulnerable to policing even in medical facilities--the very places they seek to access care. Many are also arrested pursuant to aggressive enforcement policies aimed at removing so-called unwanted persons or regulating those labeled disruptive or disorderly. Though they pose no risk of physical harm, some are arrested and taken to jail, at times simply because they have no place else to go. This Article centers disability theory as a lens for understanding the problems of policing and police violence as they impact disabled people. In doing so, the Article examines how federal disability law addresses these ongoing problems. Disabled plaintiffs have alleged disability discrimination and challenged policing and police violence under both Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, another federal disability law and the precursor to the ADA. The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether Title II of the ADA applies to arrests, and federal appellate courts are split on whether and to what extent Title II's antidiscrimination provisions apply to street encounters and arrests. Although the Court granted certiorari to a case presenting the question, City & County of San Francisco v. Sheehan, it subsequently dismissed that question as improvidently granted. There is no telling when the question will reach the Supreme Court again, but before it does, it is important to develop a theory not just of liability but also of disability under Title II that is consistent with the text, history, and animating goals of the ADA. Courts are already adopting a theory of disability that informs how they decide policing cases under Title II: the medical model of disability. However, that theory is inconsistent with that reflected by the ADA and the ADA Amendments of 2008, and it leads courts to pay insufficient attention to disability as a social construction. I examine cases showing how the ADA--contrary to its celebrated goals of access and social inclusion--has been interpreted to exclude a class of individuals from civil rights protection and from the entitlement to an accommodation by law enforcement. Ultimately, I show how the medical model of disability in policing cases serves to limit the broad scope of protections available under the ADA that could otherwise be used to push back against such disability-based subordination. Adopting and incorporating a social model of disability--that is, viewing disability as a social construction--requires a reexamination of extant legal standards regarding causation, intentional discrimination, disparate impact, and deference to law enforcement under the ADA. As I argue, the social model of disability is not only more consistent with the animating goals of the ADA but also more attuned to the social meanings at play that work to expose disabled people to policing and police violence. By centering a social model of disability in cases challenging disability-based discrimination under federal disability laws--and by incorporating disability law into ongoing public activism, discourse, and policymaking on policing--we can better identify and redress the harms stemming from the policing of disability along with the long-standing social problem of police violence.

I. INTRODUCTION 305 II. EXTENDING OLMSTEAD TO PRISONS - OPPORTUNITIES FOR POSITIVE CHANGE 308 A. Solitary Confinement 310 B. Rentry 311 III. THE PARADOX OF THE INTEGRATION MANDATE IN PRISON [...], In this Essay, I discuss Olmstead and some potential opportunities and barriers to implementing Olmstead's integration mandate in prisons. In particular, I address what I term the paradox of inclusion with respect to applying the integration mandate in prison. Recognizing that the central features and function of prisons conflict with the animating spirit of Olmstead, / discuss what is at stake in legal advocacy aimed at providing greater access and inclusion for people with disabilities in these carceral spaces. I contend that precisely because Olmstead conflicts with some of the central features and functions of the American punishment system, the Olmstead decision possesses properties that may allow for a more transformative reimagining of the rights of all incarcerated people, in addition to incarcerated people with disabilities.

Education research increasingly conceptualizes how social interactions and contexts of public schools replicate practices found in prisons. Yet prison-schooling is often left out of education research. Concurrently, prison-schooling is where we educate a disproportionate amount of multiply marginalized youth, specifically disabled Girls of Color. The lack of attention to prison-schools has limited how teaching in youth carceral facilities can be examined for its challenges and supports of disabled Girls of Color. Centering the girls' words from class observations, field notes, and interviews, this study describes and intervenes in dehumanizing and (de)socializing mechanisms in prison-school education. We explore attempts and impacts of countering prison-school education through a sociocritical literacy course infused with an abolitionist praxis. We end with discussion on the limits of countering prison-school through courses alone, suggesting abolition across multiple scales instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, legal scholars have examined the similarities between race and disability, and in particular, the similarities between the forms of social subordination, marginalization, and exclusion experienced by either racial minorities or people with disabilities. This Article builds on this existing scholarship to articulate and defend an intersectional approach to analyzing race and disability in jurisprudence, legal scholarship, and legal advocacy. In this Article, I build on the existing literature in three ways. First, building on the work of Critical Race theorists and Disability Studies scholars who have defined race and disability as social constructions, I document how, from the Founding Era to the early twentieth century, social meanings of race were influenced by social meanings of disability, and vice versa. Second, I argue that examining this co-constitutive relationship between race and disability illuminates how racist and ableist ideologies collided throughout the twentieth century, to produce, reinforce, and maintain the social marginalization and subordination of individuals who were both disabled and negatively racialized. Third, and finally, this Article demonstrates how an intersectional analysis provides not only a method for examining the relationship between race and disability, but also a historical lens through which to analyze constitutional protections and remedies. In particular, this intersectional approach can provide a historical lens for analyzing and strengthening judicial review of disability classifications under City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., Congress' section 5 powers, and disability discrimination claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Ultimately, the Article concludes with suggestions for how legal advocates can better frame legal injuries and identify legal remedies that are more attentive to the structural dimensions of racism and ableism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short essay, I explore how Liat Ben-Moshe’s Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition and Linda Steele’s Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion provide helpful analytical frameworks for legal practitioners, students, and scholars committed to responding to law’s role in producing and legitimating violence against historically marginalized groups, and in particular disabled people. This essay surfaces three key insights that Ben-Moshe and Steele provide legal scholars, practitioners, and students: the importance of the intersectional method, critical analysis on how law is complicit in ongoing forms of disability-based subordination, particularly within the criminal legal system, and the imperative of the abolitionist ethic as a necessary response to redressing forms of state violence, including in particular, legally sanctioned harms to disabled people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people of color are uniquely vulnerable to policing and punishment. Proponents of police reform and, more recently, police abolition note that disabled people, particularly people with psychiatric disabilities, are vulnerable to citation and arrest.1 Indeed, data on the high percentages of people in prisons and jails who report having a diagnosed disability lend support to this claim. Some advocates have referred to the criminalization of mental illness as a way to describe these vulnerabilities and ground their calls for change in the criminal legal system.2 Yet, even the compelling charge that mental illnesses are criminalized, or that prisons and jails are the “new asylums,”3 fails to fully account for the ways that race and disability work in tandem to render disabled people of color vulnerable to criminal legal system involvement.4 A more comprehensive account of mass incarceration and how it produces disability-based subordination is needed. In this Essay, I provide a contemporary intersectional analysis of race, gender, and disability—namely, the experiences of disabled people of color in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on policing and punishment systems. Doing so, I argue, demonstrates more specifically the unique vulnerabilities to policing and punishment that disabled people experience as a class and is more attuned to the particular vulnerabilities of disabled people of color. The sections that follow move beyond the criminalization of the mental illness frame and instead frame dangerousness and criminality as racist and ableist constructs that have been grafted onto “mental illness.” The Essay then moves to a discussion of police violence and mass incarceration, all while adding a disability lens to extant race-based critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disorderly conduct laws are a combination of common law offenses aimed at protecting the public order, peace, and tranquility. Yet, contrary to common legal conceptions, the criminalization of disorderly conduct is not just about policing behavior that threatens to disrupt public order or even the public’s peace and tranquility. Policing disorderly conduct reflects and reinforces deeply rooted discriminatory understandings about what behavior—and which persons—violate community norms. By relying on a false dichotomy between “order” and “disorder,” disorderly conduct laws construct and reinforce a hierarchy of normative behaviors that are imbued with racism, sexism, and ableism. Disorderly conduct laws “otherize” certain nonconforming behaviors, delegitimize them through the label of “disorderly,” and in doing so exclude certain historically marginalized groups from normative conceptions of community. They do this in part by prohibiting a wide range of behaviors and conferring vast amounts of discretion upon law enforcement and private citizens to target individuals for behavior regulation, physical removal, and community exclusion. These laws often determine access to shared community spaces, resulting in the exclusion of historically marginalized groups from these purportedly “public” spaces. In this way, disorderly conduct laws delineate and police the normative boundaries of communities. This Article begins by offering an overview and substantive critique of disorderly conduct laws. It then demonstrates how enforcement of these laws reinforces social hierarchies on the basis of race, gender, and disability and defines and constructs community boundaries. In this way, the Article offers a site for problematizing unitary models of community in criminal law and is situated within criminal legal scholarship’s ongoing discussions on the role of “the community” in criminal justice reform. The Article concludes by identifying pathways to end the harms of the disorderly conduct enforcement regime, including decriminalizing and abolishing disorderly conduct. Instead of honing in on specific policy reforms, the Article aims to set forth certain models that rely less on consensus and more on contestatory approaches to democratic participation, which better account for the multiplicity of communities affected by criminal law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief Essay, I offer frameworks for different ways of thinking about lawyering for abolitionist movements. In so doing, I offer a set of preliminary roles, functions, and questions that can be used to guide lawyers seeking to support movements for abolition. As I argue, in this movement for radical social change, there is a role for lawyers to play in supporting abolitionist movements in their calls to remake the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the use of criminal laws to regulate access to, and behaviors in, public spaces reinforces status hierarchies and contributes to the criminalization of marginalized groups in the U.S., using the housing crisis as a case study. Topic discussed include the Ninth Circuit case Boise v. Martin, constitutional limits of criminalizing acts that occur in public, and the public ordering function of criminal law.

Over the last five decades, advocates have fought for and secured constitutional prohibitions challenging solitary confinement, including ending the placement and prolonged isolation of individuals with psychiatric disabilities in solitary confinement. Yet, despite the valiant efforts of this courageous movement to protect the rights of incarcerated people with disabilities through litigation, the legal regime protecting these rights reflects a troubling paradigm: ableism. Ableism is a complex system of cultural, political, economic, and social practices that facilitate, construct, or reinforce the subordination of people with disabilities in a given society. In this Essay I argue that current Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in prison conditions of confinement cases in some ways requires lawyers to engage in ableism to protect their clients from harsh and inhumane treatment. The complexity of this arrangement--as between protecting and expanding the rights of people with disabilities and reinforcing practices that facilitate their exclusion and subordination--is both a cause and effect of ableism, particularly in the area of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Though entrenched in our legal institutions, the overrepresentation of people with disabilities in the criminal legal system calls for a new approach to the representation of these individuals. Toward that end, this Essay proposes a series of interventions in both law and professional practice to reduce the reliance on, and effect of, ableism in representing people with disabilities in the prison reform litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the debate surrounding employer's affirmative obligations under the reasonable accommodation clause of the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act. Topics discussed include use of the affirmative action analogy for the same; Southeastern Community College v. Davis court case on the same; and courts take on the same.

The article takes a look at prison-schools for disabled Girls of Color and the state of incarcerated Girls of Color. It outlines practices in youth prison-schools that include curricular reduction, remedial pedagogy and relational antagonism. Reasons are cited as to why prison-school practices are harmful including trauma and special education. Recommended actions include increasing data collection, improving education in carceral facilities, and updating of policies.