“Decarcerating Disability”

by Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe

May 4th, 12 PM PDT

In her book Decarcerating Disability, Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe shows how disability/mad knowledges and histories should inform analysis of the closure of carceral enclosures—such as prisons, jails, psychiatric hospitals and residential institutions for those with intellectual or developmental disabilities—through the prism of abolition. In this presentation, Ben-Moshe will discuss key findings and themes from the book, focusing on the questions: what does an intersectional mad/disability framework brings to our understanding of decarceration and abolition? How did the concept of abolition play out in different arenas of incarceration—in anti-psychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities and the fight against the prison industrial complex? What if we understand these forces in tandem as opposed to causal effects, i.e. deinstitutionalization caused the rise of incarceration and the rise of ‘the mentally ill’ in prisons and jails? This session will be recorded.

Liat Ben-Moshe is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (University of Minnesota Press 2020) and co-editor (with Allison Carey and Chris Chapman) of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (Palgrave 2014) She is an activist-scholar working at the intersection of incarceration, abolition, and disability/madness.

For accessible copies of Dr. Ben-Moshe’s slides please contact Dr. Ben-Moshe. Her contact information can be found here.