dISABILITY JUSTIcE IN PRISONS

mother deemed it unfit for a ‘deceased animal’. Yet her son was being held there for over three months, and he was found deceased, covered in insects when guards found him. In the US, over 66 percent of inmates are disabled, 40% of those with a psychiatric disability. If the conditions of disabled prisoners are inhumane living conditions, improper medical treatment, lack of access to medication, and coerced participation in medical treatments, then their punishment for being disabled is death – That is what lack of care means in prisons.

reproductive rights, and eugenics for marginalized women.

TheUnited States has a long and violent history of systemic medical neglect against Black Americans. Black American’s bodies have been used and abused through forced labor, physical punishment, science and medicine experiments and subject to the effects of food insecurity and environmental racism. When inside of prisons, the treatment of Black Americans seeking medical care shows signs of systemic neglect, and the overwhelming disabled populations in prisons are victims of insufficient care and ableism. One case of medical neglect and inhumane living conditions resulted in the death of Lashawn Thompson in Fulton County Jail, Georgia.

Lashawn Thompson’s case is an example of the intersectional avenues of neglect within prisons. Thompson was commited to jail for a misdeamor and was held a Fulton County for three months, and transferred to the psychiatric ward for exhibiting mental distress. The cell Thompson was placed in was infested with insects and covered in filth– Thompson’s

Issues of medical abuse are even more prominent in women’s facilities, where almost 80% of incarcerated women are disabled. With percentages of 60% in men’s facilities and 80% in women’s facilities of inmates with disabilities, then disability may be characteristic to incarceration. Women in prisons face medical neglect on the additional axis of reproductive rights, as coerced sterilization, untreated reproductive conditions, involuntary removal of reproductive organs during unrelated surgeries that occurred within prison hospitals are reported by 40% percent of incarcerated women. Medical neglect now becomes gendered violence against women, violation of human and

The issue of disability justice will continue to persist as prisons do, as medical neglect and abuse is a systemic facet of mass incarceration. The medical facilities within prisons also operate in the Prison Industrial Complex and are foundational in understanding the violence of the prison system. Within custody, prisoners are not protected and their lives are not valued, especially if they are incapable of profiting the prisons through unpaid labor. Disabled prisoners deserve the chance to live. We must unlearn and relearn that disabled lives are worthy lives. All of us.