The Politics of Childhood, Cognitive Disability, and the "Bare Life" in the Carceral State

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-3 - Child Protection? Engaging the Politics of Childhood in a Carceral Landscape

Abstract

On April 24, 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States of America moved to ban electrical stimulation devices and other aversive technologies that are used to treat aggressive or self-injurious behavior. Recognizing that these devices present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury, the FDA is proposing to include in this ban both new devices and devices already in distribution and use. But this is not a done deal. Over the next 30 days, the FDA has opened up the issue for public comment and there are several powerful constituencies (including some parents) who are vehemently opposed to this ban. We, however, are troubled by the frequency with which disabled children and adults (especially those with cognitive disabilities) experience physical and mental abuse and even death at the hands of not only agents of the State (police /teachers /nursing home employees) but also individual citizens (Parents/ children/personal caregivers) and by the complacency with which the public regard these forms of punishment as both normative and necessary. Even more troubling is the realization that these aversive technologies are not only located in prisons but also in the most unexpected spaces of confinement – rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, and even schools.
In Homo Sacer and the Bare Life, Georgia Agamben describes the “camp” as the “zone of indistinction between law and violence” where those bodies located in these exceptional spaces are stripped of citizenship rights, and social privileges to represent the “bare life.” In this essay, we will deploy Agamben’s analysis in angry response to the context of the everyday violence via disciplinary and other behavioral modification practices that are meted out against students living at the dangerous intersections of race, class, gender, and disability and located in spaces of confinement such as schools, developmental centers, and family homes. We argue here that the logic of the “state of exception” applies to disabled children and adults where acts of violence enacted via disciplinary practices, security personnel, and even personal caregivers (teachers/teacher aides/parents) are justified as being outside the realm of the legal and subject to sovereign power. We choose as the locus of our study, the Judge Rothenberg Center (JRC) that over the past 40 years has utilized behavioral techniques that have been investigated as abusive and only very recently has been held accountable for these infractions. In this essay, we carefully examine the discourses used to justify these forms of inhumane punishment as well as the discourses that oppose them. It is our intent that such an analysis will foreground the real material implications of “how we understand the role of systems and institutions of punishment” in the most unexpected spaces of confinement for children and adults with cognitive disabilities. In addition it will help us theorize the meaning “the child” in a carceral state.

Authors

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama

• Dean L Adams, University of Toledo