The Criminalization of Immigration and Intellectual Disability in the United States

Abstract

Public attitudes, negative stereotypes, and stigma are essential to cultural narratives about the membership status of people with intellectual disability and people who have immigrated to the United States. With a concern for the exclusion of people from participation in democratic societies, this mixed methods study explores conceptual links between the criminalization of intellectual disability and immigration. The overlay of criminal justice norms and practices onto civil law without parallel adoption of safeguards results in the misallocation of risk to individuals with out-group membership status. This study offers conceptual analysis by applying to the policy issue, standard of proof of intellectual disability in death penalty cases, the framework of membership theory and related constructs present in the scholarly literature on immigration policy. Exact measures logistic regression is used to predictively link states’ standards of proof of intellectual disability with immigration status. It was found that the best model predicting the probability of a Higher than Preponderance standard of proof of intellectual disability in death penalty cases was a two-variable model consisting of Prior Ban and Unauthorized Immigration. This study presents recommendations for research and policy practice.