Centering Disability Justice: Institutionalized Women in Carceral Settings

• In Event: Lightning Talk: New Directions in Health Criminology

Abstract

Historical and contemporary studies show how prisons, carceral institutions, and psychiatric facilities have merged under punitive logics of “care.” Today, the healthcare system, criminal legal system, and child welfare system are closely linked in processes of criminalizing care. However, limited research examines how legal cases within child protective services justify punitive interventions using the “best interest of the child” framework to address violence against women. Utilizing a disability justice framework, this paper will discuss future theoretical directions in the ways we conduct research with vulnerable women who are institutionalized in carceral settings. Disability Justice requires us to examine not only the interdependent nature of multiply minoritized and vulnerable categories but also the ways it recognizes the wholeness of those most impacted by injustice. By recognizing wholeness, I do not mean merely acknowledging people through the multiple categories they embody (e.g., race, gender, class, disability) but also understanding how the more invisible aspects of their experiences reveal the consequences of neglecting a holistic view. This neglect helps justify labeling some individuals as “crazy,” “insane,” “unfit,” and affects their health and wellbeing. Disability Justice allows us to see how the centering of “normality” around womanhood creates rigid categories of exclusion, determining who is deemed unfit for society and requiring institutionalization and medicalization as a means of correction.

Author

• Katherine Maldonado Fabela, University of Utah