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Disability Incarcerated

With an interdisciplinary focus, this book makes crucial connections between disability studies and the study of incarceration while expanding theoretical boundaries of each discipline.

 

This ground-breaking title is the only book-length work in disability studies or prison/incarceration studies that covers the geographical, temporal, and disciplinary areas highlighted in this collection.

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Disability Incarcerated gathers thirteen contributions from an impressive array of fields. Taken together, these essays assert that a complex understanding of disability is crucial to an understanding of incarceration, and that we must expand what has come to be called 'incarceration.' The chapters in this book examine a host of sites, such as prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, special education, detention centers, and group homes; explore why various sites should be understood as incarceration; and discuss the causes and effects of these sites historically and currently. This volume includes a preface by Professor Angela Y. Davis and an afterword by Professor Robert McRuer.

Book cover of Disability Incarcerated by Liat Ben-Moshe. This cover shows an abstract blue, black, and white drawing that depicts interlocking thorns and branches. The title "Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada" is in white text overlaying a maroon square.

"Disability Incarcerated challenges both scholarship and activism around the prison industrial complex by demonstrating how disability is central to systems of incarceration. It further shows how the build-up of the prison nation is not just around policing race and gender, but simultaneously policing disability. This book thus highlights how race, colonialism, and gender operate through disability. An amazing collection."

 

- Andrea Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA

"Disability Incarcerated constitutes a major contribution to critical disability and penal studies, joining the two as no other book does . . . Only now and then does a work of scholarship so ground-breaking, so well theorized, and so daring appear on the scene. And seldom do we come across an anthology destined to become a classic."

 

- Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

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