Access Living friends and allies,
Today, we’d like to share the release of our new paper on disability and the criminal system. As many of you know, people with disabilities are over-represented in every aspect of the criminal system. Why does this happen, and what can be done to keep more people with disabilities out of jails and prisons? Over the last several years, the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge has funded Access Living and other groups to look at ways to reduce the jail incarceration of people with disabilities.
The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) selected four disability-centered grantees to write papers to look at different aspects of the incarceration of disabled people. As of today, all four papers are now live at the SJC website. They are:
- Expecting Difference: Reorienting Disability Strategy for Jail Decarceration by Access Living (view the Access Living paper at this link)
- An Intersectional Approach to Advocacy on Prison and Jail Conditions by the Center for Racial and Disability Justice (CRDJ) (view the CRDJ paper at this link)
- The Overrepresentation of People with Disabilities and Deaf People in Local Criminal Legal Systems by Activating Change (view the Activating Change paper at this link)
- Reducing the Arrest and Jailing of People with Mental Health Disabilities, Including Those with Intersectional Identities by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (view the Bazelon paper at this link)
Access Living’s paper looks at strategic lessons learned from disability-led organizations and initiatives, and how their approaches can benefit system-impacted people with disabilities. Our paper calls for a new look at strategies that center peer support and peer leadership, by and for systems-impacted people with disabilities. The paper also looks at where disability perspectives such as disability justice and independent living philosophy can contrast greatly with corrections-based perspectives currently in place in most, if not all, jails.
We’d like to thank the SJC for its support, and we’d also like to congratulate our fellow grantees on the launch of their respective grantees. Collectively, our hope is that these papers widen key discussions on why and how people with disabilities are incarcerated, and lead to work that makes tangible difference in the lives of disabled people at risk of incarceration.
Please share this announcement with fellow advocates interested in this area. Thank you, as always, for your advocacy.