Halfway Home to a Decarceral Future: Speculative Explorations of Radical Mental Healthcare

• In Event: Decarceral Futures: Dismantling Carceral Architectures in the Late-Stage American Empire

Abstract

In this late-stage American Empire, it is dangerous to be a mad person of color in a world ruled by the carceral imagination. How and where do we provide care for such people? We disappear into the carceral state and reappear into a place that doesn’t exist in the public eye: the transitional rehabilitative system. In terms of carceral geographies, places like halfway houses and rehabilitation centers and detox centers exist on the margins of most major cities. They exist in an abstract geography that posits the people who occupy it do not exist. A reality that refuses to show up in Google Maps, despite seeing it with the naked eye. The formerly incarcerated are a highly-policed people. We are hustled off park benches and warm subway trains into city jails, often transferred into psychiatric hospitals, into prisons or into jails. The lives (and deaths) of Jordan Neely and Sonya Massey were brief, sharp flares in Black Lives Matter, but much focus is on the blackness of their lives, not their psychiatric disabilities. To receive care in the era of incarceration is an experience of erasure. Many people ask, what does a world without the police look like? My answer is, let science fiction show us.

I will utilize the craft of speculation to explore the question of the abolition of the American transitional care system through a decolonized speculative narrative about Chicago’s transitional housing system during the rise of the War on Drugs. By merging historical research with speculative storytelling, I explore new possibilities for mental healthcare systems within a radically just, decolonized future. By integrating historical and creative perspectives on mental healthcare activism and mad studies, my literary presentation aims to promote new understandings of carceral ableism and subvert public understanding of carceral geographies pertaining to prisoner re-entry.

On the surface, my doctoral dissertation is a literary speculative novel about mental illness, addiction, and prisoner re-entry, but it’s really a story about communal forgiveness as a tool for liberation and the radical framework of disability justice.It’s a creative dissertation that asks the question, what does it take to be forgiven? What does it take to receive care when you have done harm?

For this conference, I plan to provide a live reading from this literary speculative novel as well as discuss how this new work is contributing to what Isaiah Lavender, Grace Dillon, Taryne Jade Taylor and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay call CoFuturisms, a new sub-genre of speculative literature which utilizes decolonial worldbuilding. In my work, decolonial worldbuilding is employed to formulate a vision of a world that pivots from white supremacy and capitalism to center communities who live with psychiatric disabilities: I call this Mad Futurism. By operating in a speculative mode, my dissertation offers a critique of the medical-industrial complex and carceral geographies while utilizing the notion of forgiveness as a tool for liberation.

Author

• Jumi Bello, University of Nevada-Las Vegas