LIT

Disability Justice and the Project of Abolition

In commonplace crisis responses enacted by those problematically coined ‘first responders,’ detainment, disrespect of autonomy, and removal from support networks of friends and family are embraced as standard practice. Community members—presented with few envisionable alternatives and made to believe that they are ensuring the safety of the person in crisis—often work within this underlyingly punitive conception of care and inadvertently cement its dominance over the mental health landscape. For the past decade, Project LETS (Let’s

Erase the Stigma), a national movement led by and for people with lived experience of mental illness,

Disability, and neurodivergence, has been committed to instead “building just, responsive, and transformative peer support collectives and community mental health care structures,” as described by the group’s mission statement. First formalized by the work of students at Brown University, LETS today undertakes initiatives like a Peer Mental Health

Advocate program, which offers one-on-one, longterm relationship building opportunities between those with shared experiences of mental health both in campus communities and amongst the general public. Through these interpersonal relationships and virtual skills-based workshops, the group seeks to raise consciousness and disseminate the tools that would abolish practices removing persons from communities, instead building transformative, care-focused networks of peers. Amid the pandemic and movements for Black liberation, LETS has focused on expanding mutual aid networks and underscoring how abolition must center the complete dissolution of all carceral structures, including psychiatric ones. Combatting the intense isolation of the pandemic and its compoundment of fear-based responses to crises, LETS aims to aid community members in creating networks of care resistant to the controlling and neglectful options currently at hand. To supplant these punitive structures and their foundational power imbalances, LETS facilitates the unlearning of tendencies to police persons in crisis and to perceive their behaviors as threatening and them as disposable—in short, to “become these little cops to each other … who do the work of the carceral state for it,” Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, a 2017

Brown University graduate and LETS’ executive director, told the College Hill Independent. Much of the group’s work distills how a Disability justice framework, which recognizes how intersectional oppression compounds ableism, provides an avenue for transcending self-policing, the policing of one another, and punitive hierarchies generally. In Rhode Island specifically, LETS has collaborated with and offered abolitionist crisis response training to varied audiences, including social workers, crisis operators, student groups, and anti-state violence activists like the Alliance to Mobilize our

Resistance (AMOR). Throughout these efforts,

LETS grounds Disability justice and its implications for the broader abolitionist project in material support initiatives (such as their Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks) and in ideological commitments to

“what regular people can do in their community for each other,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said. “You don’t need a license; you don’t need a degree … We can do something else other than be tiny little arms of the carceral state.”

Focus on peer leadership is especially critical given that, within the United States and in RI specifically, clinical and often coercive psychiatric facilities almost exclusively define the existing healthcare landscape. For instance, only around 14 peer respite centers—which provide voluntary, community-based, and non-clinical overnight programs—exist nationwide. LETS’ model centers the support of peers with experience of mental illness, rather than that of mental health ‘experts,’ which places agency back in the hands of Disabled and neurodivergent community members. The scarcity of such holistic, “wraparound systems of care,” as Kaufman-Mthimkhulu describes, reflects a societal inclination toward equating Disability with volatility, which makes communities fearful of those with mental illness, leading to their removal to carceral institutions. At the core of this treatment lie the same paternalistic, hierarchical systems of control and oversight that create and animate the prison-industrial complex. LETS thus targets its workshop interventions at the personal relationships through which fear-based decision-making ultimately funnels Disabled people into carceral apparatuses, whether psychiatric facilities or prisons. “A lot of the time, it’s not that people want the police involved; it’s that they don’t know what else to do,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu explained, acknowledging that abolishing oppressive systems entails urgently building supportive and caring ones. “We can talk all day long about how we need to abolish police and abolish psych wards, but if we don’t actually have other resources and tools and systems in place for people to engage with when someone’s in crisis, that’s a big ask and a big expectation… It can feel like we’d be asking people to do it all by themselves.” As such, LETS’ abolitionist crisis response trainings—usually led by Kaufman-Mthimkhulu and other Disability justice facilitators—emerge as places to envision a different future. Here, LETS aims to provide attendees and partnered organizations, like AMOR, with the ability to construct and preserve care systems within their own communities. This skill-building incorporates Disability justice frameworks like peer deescalation, proactive safety planning, boundary setting in crisis situations, and mapping out individuals who can provide support. Though LETS primarily empowers communities to apply these skills as suits their needs, the group also actively acknowledges how taxing it can be to mitigate unpredictable or violent treatment by first-responders. Aligned with LETS’ principal commitment to fostering “cross-movement solidarity,” the organization thus seeks to install enduring relationships with the groups that receive their training. Follow-ups for workshops include a Google Drive resource folder, ‘skills labs’ to continue practicing and imagining alternatives, and Q&A sessions. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu detailed that LETS seeks to train around 30 people across different movements in Rhode Island to be emotionally and tactically equipped to organically spread the contents of these workshops across other communities. “That’s really important; facilitation skills are not something that everybody automatically has, being able to hold space, being able to acknowledge if you’ve harmed someone in a space, even as a facilitator—those are things that might come naturally to some folks, but also need to be practiced,” they said.

In addition to providing tangible skills, the trainings also underscore the urgent intersections between carceral ableism—which conflates safety for Disabled people with confinement—and mass incarceration, particularly in the context of proliferating discourse surrounding prison abolition and racial capitalism over the past year. Kaufman-Mthimkhulu insists, though, that “organizers have been drawing connections, talking about carceral ableism, talking about how it’s not just prisons and jails for years. It’s psych wards, group ‘homes,’ nursing facilities … all these spaces that seek to confine, limit bodily autonomy and decision making,” they explained. Psychiatric facilities, LETS describes in its workshop, serve as sites of incarceration, whose key characteristics of control are akin to what we popularly conceive as prison. Citing L. Harris, an organizer with the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care, LETS emphasizes the following parallels: solitary confinement, seclusion, and physical restraint are commonplace, BIPOC are disproportionately represented, information from the outside world is heavily censored, and the overwhelming majority are survivors of traumatic experiences. The historical development of prisons is inextricably linked to the shuttering of asylums. While state narratives purport that the mid-twentieth century closure of asylums constituted deinstitutionalization, Disability justice organizers instead term the process “transcarceration,” underscoring the intentional and simultaneous ascendance of prison infrastructure. Notably, more than 70 former mental institutions were reconfigured into prisons. The jail system then emerged as the primary site to “contain and control Disabled and mentally ill people,” according to Dan Berger, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Washington. Emphasizing the present manifestations of this historical legacy, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu added that prisons also produce the very disabilities that they criminalize: “We know that prisons themselves cause and create disability,” they said. “If you did not go into prison with a mental illness or disability, you’re probably coming out with one, especially if you’ve been in solitary confinement.”

How crisis responses can and must center community

Seeking to solidify its presence in Providence and beyond the confines of elite institutions, LETS is undertaking a slew of influential initiatives: purchasing a home in Rhode Island to serve as a community peer respite center, buying and revamping a van for a pilot mobile crisis response program, and bolstering their Community Peer Mental Health Advocate (CPMHA) cohort. Throughout these building efforts and their existing care networks, LETS already enacts and continues to envision a world that understands genuine care and safety to come from the enlivening of vulnerable human relationships rather than clinical confinement. Down to its future-looking funding streams, LETS centers principles of community control and collective autonomy, intentionally circumventing state support that comes with binding stipulations and predatory earmarks. “Taking money from the state means that you are accountable to the state,” Kaufman-Mthimkhulu noted. “For us, with Project LETS, our goal is to create our own revenue streams and be financially sustained through our community members,” whose accountability to one another constitutes the transformative capacity for genuine safety that undergirds LETS’ work to begin with.

JACK DOUGHTY B’23 AND ROSE HOUGLET B’23 encourage readers to donate to LETS’ Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks (projectlets.org/ traumaheallingfund).