Disability and the prison system – Briarpatch [2023-09-07]

There’s a saying among prisoners: if you don’t have a disability going into prison, you’re probably leaving with one.

Disability justice and prisoner justice advocates often call prisons the new asylums. Canada has long history of institutionalizing disabled people in asylums, institutions for the deaf or blind, and psychiatric facilities. In these institutions, people were subjected to severe abuse and neglect. While asylums no longer exist in the form they once did, Canada continues to warehouse disabled people today in long-term care homes, group homes, psychiatric facilities, and prisons – which further disable people.

Prisons often remove prisoners’ assistive devices and medications – or use them as a reason to put an individual in solitary confinement. Kitten Keyes, an Indigenous and disabled prisoner, was made to sleep on the floor of her cell because it wasn’t wheelchair accessible, and she could not transfer herself to the bunk. She was unable to manoeuvre to the toilet without grab bars and was forced to defecate onherself when no one would help her. Gregory Allen was allowed his wheelchair, but at the expense of being placed in solitary confinement for 412 days, well beyond the 15-consecutive-day limit the United Nations uses to distinguish segregation from torture.

The fear of being put into extended segregation keeps prisoners from disclosing mental health issues; I myself didn’t disclose any of my psychiatric history, having heard stories of how people with mental illness were treated in prison both on the range and in solitary. Another common way prisons disable people is by withholding people’s medications or assistive devices like knee braces or eyeglasses – even when they came in with them. This is something I saw first-hand while inside.

For the past year, I’ve been working with the Disability Justice Network of Ontario on their Prison Project to support racialized, disabled prisoners in Ontario. We run support lines for prisoners to help them connect to people outside, work to amplify their experiences, and help support them in organizing collective demands for things like access to medical care.