Disability injustice : confronting criminalization in Canada

Fritsch, Kelly (editor.). Monaghan, Jeffrey, 1980- (editor.). Van der Meulen, Emily, 1977- (editor.).

Summary: Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous - even deadly - for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists to explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system. The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance within criminal law systems; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, they examine disability in relation to various agencies and aspects of the criminal justice system. Policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement are among the areas of focus. Drawing on empirical data and new theoretical insights, Disability Injustice investigates how disability intersects with race, class, gender, and sexuality to perpetuate oppression, paying particular attention to ways forward. This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can and should challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.

Record details

ISBN: 9780774867139 (softcover)
Physical Description: print
351 pages ; 23 cm
Publisher: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Press, [2022]
Copyright: ©2022

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Resisting the criminalization of disability: crippling disability injustice toward accessible decarceral futures / Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen -- Part 1: practices and processes of criminalization. From prisoner to patient: mental health and Toronto's Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Females, 1880-1969 / Theresa L. Raymond -- Histories of living in a negative relation to the law: resistance to HIV criminalization / Alexander McClelland -- The criminalization of sex work: creating conditions for disability / Lindsay Blewett -- The judicialization of everyday life in Quebec: intellectual disability, sexuality, and control / Guillaume Ouellet, Lisandre Labrecque-Lebeau, Pierre Pariseau-Legault, and Emmanuelle Bernheim -- Part 2: The criminal (in)justice system. Police encounters with "people in crisis": mental health and policing / Alok Mukherjee -- Therapeutic justice or epistemic injustice? The case of mental health courts in Quebec / Sue-Ann MacDonald, Veronique Fortin, and Stephanie Houde -- Conceptualizing jury representation: research on physical disability and the "larger community" in Canadian jury rolls / Richard Jochelson and Michelle I. Bertrand -- Punishing disability and trauma: evaluating the use of segregation in Canadian prisons -- Megan A. Rusciano -- Part 3: reconceptualizing disability and reframing justice. Disability, politics, and collectively reimagining justice: challenging the ableist contours of the 1969 Canadian Criminal Code reform / River Rossi -- The politics of death-making/assisted suicide: a Castoriadan reading / Ravi Malhotra -- #endpoliceviolence: non-hegemonic bodies, police violence, and abolitionist politics / Abigail Curlew and Jeffrey Monaghan -- Refuting carceral logics and their alternatives: toward noncarceral (disability) futures / Liat Ben-Moshe -- Contributors -- Index.