It Can’t Be Fixed Because It’s Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison Industrial Complex

Abstract

Prisons1 are dangerous places, especially if you are racialized and disabled. Because of the ways that prisons are constructed, imagined, and maintained, rampant ableism and racism affect the daily lives of many prisoners. In this chapter, we explore how disability and experiences of racialization are constructed throughout the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)2 within the Canadian context (Turtle Island). Further, we contend that colonization, racism, and ableism are inherent to the functioning of the penal system. The PIC is based on a set of interests created and maintained to support capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, ableism, and white supremacy. It acts as a form of social control for the rich and powerful. As such, it benefits politicians, governments, big businesses, developers, law enforcement, and the nonprofit industrial complex. Angela Davis (2003) explains, To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality—such as images of Black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners. (55) KeywordsBlack WomanIndigenous PeopleMental Health IssueDisable PeoplePsychiatric DisabilityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.