Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

Decarcerating Disability begins with a history that prison-abolition narratives too often omit: the largest twentieth-century exodus from carceral facilities was not a fall in prison populations but the closure of psychiatric hospitals and large institutions for people labeled intellectually or developmentally disabled. Liat Ben-Moshe places deinstitutionalization and prison abolition in one analytic frame. She does not claim that the institutions are identical. She asks why both can remove freedom of movement, residence, and decision in the name of treatment, protection, or public safety—and why disabled and mad people are repeatedly invoked as proof that confinement is unavoidable.

The book dismantles an especially durable common-sense account: hospitals closed, people were abandoned to the streets, and prisons became “the new asylums.” Ben-Moshe does not deny catastrophic shortages of housing, voluntary care, and community support, nor the overrepresentation of disabled people in prison. She disputes the simple causal chain. It casts deinstitutionalization as a failed experiment and makes renewed coercive treatment appear progressive, while obscuring the distinct histories of penal expansion, racial capitalism, welfare retrenchment, and policing. Prisons did not naturally inherit a population when asylums emptied; their growth was another political and economic choice.

Using archives and cases from antipsychiatry, intellectual-disability deinstitutionalization, community-living campaigns, class-action litigation, and prison abolition, the author demonstrates that abolition has already happened in partial and contested forms. Closing a building, however, is not freedom if people are transferred to closely monitored group homes, compulsory medication, guardianship, homelessness, or poverty. She pays particular attention to organized resistance against community integration and reads disability-based exclusion alongside racial residential segregation. The apparently local question of who may live “in our neighborhood” has always policed both racial and ability boundaries.

“Race-ability” names one of the book’s major interventions. In eugenics, intelligence testing, dangerousness assessments, police killing, and prison classification, racism and ableism are not independent axes that happen to intersect; they have historically produced one another. Racialized people are more readily labeled irrational, deficient, or threatening, while disability is invoked to legitimize surveillance, guardianship, and removal. Grounded in feminist, queer, and crip-of-color critique, Ben-Moshe asks disability studies to move beyond inclusion in existing institutions and place state violence, colonial classification, and the prison-industrial complex at its center.

This produces a searching critique of the politics of “inclusion.” Visibility, employment, and institutional diversity can coexist with profit-making disability-service markets, a formation Ben-Moshe describes as “Dis Inc.” Litigation has exposed institutional abuse and secured meaningful rights, yet a legal victory can also translate radical demands into minimum standards administered by experts. The feminist implication is sharp: leaving an institution is not self-determination if professionals still decide a person’s life, or if the cost of support is simply reassigned to mothers, partners, and underpaid women care workers. State withdrawal is not the same as a resourced community.

The book’s most constructive contribution is to define abolition as a practice of knowledge. Institutions teach that confinement is the only realistic response. Abolition requires “unlearning” inherited notions of dangerousness, normality, and professional authority and treating the knowledge made by incarcerated people, mad people, and disability movements as theory. The goal is not better sorting between hospital and prison, but accessible nonsegregated housing, voluntary health care, income support, transport, peer networks, crisis response, and actual decision-making power. Care then ceases to be freedom’s opposite and becomes one of the material conditions through which freedom can endure.

This is not an operational handbook, and its history is largely that of the United States in the later twentieth century. Family responsibility, public medicine, guardianship law, and institutionalization take very different forms elsewhere, so its chronology cannot serve as a universal model. The book offers a framework rather than a ready-made budget for the everyday conflicts that follow facility closure. Readers in resource-poor settings still need locally grounded answers to who supplies intensive support and how to prevent unpaid women family members from becoming an invisible replacement institution.

A strong reading path pairs chapter four, “Why Prisons Are Not ‘the New Asylums,’” with the chapter on NIMBY resistance, desegregation, and race-ability, then follows the final critique of litigation as both a politicizing force and a “governable iron cage.” Read it with Captive Genders, Abolition. Feminism. Now., and writing from disability-justice organizers to extend its queer, trans, and practical dimensions. For FemRes, it supplies a demanding test: decarceration cannot be measured only by beds closed, but by how many people gain the housing, support, relationships, and power required to direct their own lives.