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Disability Wiki

Incarceration and Criminalization

This page is about how prisons, jails, and policing affect disabled and Deaf people — and, first, about the disabled and Deaf people organizing to change that. The structural harm here is real, but it is context, not the whole story.

Leadership and organizing first

Section titled “Leadership and organizing first”

The throughline of disabled and Deaf carceral organizing is a simple, radical claim: the people most harmed by prisons and policing should lead the work to end that harm — and many of those organizers are themselves disabled, Deaf, or formerly incarcerated.

  • HEARD (Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf communities), founded by Black nonbinary disabled lawyer Talila A. Lewis, built the only national database of Deaf and disabled incarcerated people. Its public-education team is made up of formerly incarcerated Deaf and disabled people doing political education and reentry work.
  • A concrete win: after more than a decade of organizing led by HEARD and allies, the FCC adopted a rule (FCC 24-75, WC Docket No. 23-62, adopted July 2024) — implementing the Martha Wright-Reed Act — requiring incarcerated-communications providers to offer point-to-point video service so Deaf incarcerated people can communicate in ASL.
  • Disability Justice Culture Club, a collective of disabled QTBIPOC organizers in East Oakland, builds “joyful resistance,” mutual aid, and work against police violence — disabled-led, place-based community power.
  • A growing body of work holds that disability justice and prison abolition are the same project from two directions (e.g., Liat Ben-Moshe’s Decarcerating Disability; Katie Tastrom’s A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice).

Disability is the norm behind bars, not the exception

Section titled “Disability is the norm behind bars, not the exception”
  • Hard data (federal survey): an estimated 32% of state and federal prisoners and 40% of people in local jails reported at least one disability — roughly 3–4× the rate in the general population (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Disabilities Among Prison and Jail Inmates, 2011–12). A later BJS survey (the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, published 2021) found about 38% of state and federal prisoners reported a disability. Cognitive disability is the single most common type. (These rely on self-report and likely undercount intellectual/developmental and undiagnosed disabilities — treat 1-in-3 as a floor.)
  • Mental illness is criminalized. BJS found roughly 43% of state prisoners had been told by a professional they had a mental-health condition. Jails and prisons are now widely described as the country’s largest psychiatric provider — a well-supported framing born of decades of disinvestment in community care.

The realities (told honestly)

Section titled “The realities (told honestly)”
  • Denied access can be life-and-death. Incarcerated Deaf people routinely report no ASL interpreters (including for medical care), being told to lip-read or pass notes — affecting medical treatment, discipline, and parole. Courts have repeatedly found these to be ADA violations.
  • Policing. Researchers estimate that up to a third to a half of people killed by police are disabled (Ruderman Foundation, 2016). This is an estimate from a media-coverage analysis, not a comprehensive death count — keep it hedged.
  • Criminalizing homelessness. After the Supreme Court’s 2024 Grants Pass decision allowed cities to enforce anti-camping laws against unhoused people, many cities and states moved to pass or expand camping bans and other criminalization measures (tracked by groups such as the National Homelessness Law Center) — directly affecting people with psychiatric and substance-use disabilities.
  • School-to-prison pipeline. Students with disabilities are about 17% of K–12 enrollment but receive roughly 29% of out-of-school suspensions, suspended at about 3× the rate of non-disabled peers — with race compounding the gap.
  • Solitary confinement both targets disabled people and creates lasting psychiatric disability; by some estimates around half of prison and jail suicides occur in solitary, even though people held there are only a small share of those incarcerated (a pattern documented by suicide-prevention researchers and corrections-oversight bodies).

A loop, not a line

Section titled “A loop, not a line”

The harm here is a feedback loop: school discipline → arrest → confinement → solitary → new disability → reentry without support → re-incarceration. Naming it as a loop is also where organizers find the openings to break it — at every stage, disabled and formerly incarcerated people are leading that work.

Organizations and resources

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Contribute to This Page

Section titled “Contribute to This Page”

This page especially needs the expertise of disabled, Deaf, and formerly incarcerated people. If you can strengthen or correct it, see How to Contribute.