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Toward communities of care: Disability justice as a cornerstone of abolition (The Daily Californian)

 

By Saya Abney, October 23, 2020, The Daily Californian.

“What people don’t understand is that there’s no way to socially distance inside,” Kelly Savage-Rodriguez explains to me over the phone. Savage-Rodriguez is a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, or CCWP, an organization currently involved with several campaigns for compassionate release and sentence commutations for elderly and immunocompromised prisoners who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19. Although jail and prison officials claim that they are implementing plans to socially distance, California has a massive overcrowding problem in its detention facilities, and the tendency to pack cells has only helped the virus rip through the state’s prisons and jails. And statistically, the incarcerated population is particularly at risk for COVID-19: Incarcerated people in the U.S. are up to four times more likely to have at least one disability than the general population, and more than 10% of the U.S. prison population is over the age of 55.

This is not a phenomenon that is unique to incarceration. Our culture of cruelty is one that is deeply rooted in ableist logic — rather than trying to fix society to help people navigate it, we are taught to exclude those who don’t fit our image of the perfect citizen. Locking people up rather than addressing their needs and the needs of those victimized by crime is the same cruel logic that created institutions rather than making a society accessible to disabled people, and it often impacts the same marginalized groups that are considered disposable under a carceral capitalist framework for society.

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