By Russ Immarigeon
Journal of Community Justice
“As long as the carceral state exists,” writes independent researcher Katie Tastrom: It will always use health and disablement as weapons—from who gets access to vaccines, to the ways government neglect leads to “underlying conditions” that make COVID-19 more likely to be deadly, to being forced into congregate settings through laws that criminalize poverty. . . . These policies make the difference between life and death, freedom and captivity, and health and sickness.
In A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice, Tastrom, a former attorney and sex worker, provides an accessible and full-range compendium of information leading readers through the basics of carceral abolition and the history and principles of disability justice. She examines the relationship between sex work, disability, and criminalization. She explores short- and long-term care, medical systems, drugs, social work, benefits and charity, and disablement. She considers steps moving things forward.
Tastrom coins the phrase “carceral epidemiology” to refer to the methods and means systems of formal and informal control use communicable diseases—most recently exemplified throughout the COVID-19 crisis—“as part of the informal punishment of incarceration.” By this, she means that “the risk of getting sick is an intentional aspect of punishment”:
The people who died and continue to die from COVID-19 aren’t a random sampling of the population. They are disproportionately marginalized and institutionalized. When the government shirks its duty to keep people safe—both in times of emergency and in daily life—those who are already vulnerable pay the biggest price.
Tastrom argues that abolition is vital to “disability justice.” Prisons are alleged to provide safety, but she asserts that “disabled people are safer without prisons, police, and other carceral systems.” Prisons lock
disabled people up longer, confront them more frequently with disciplinary actions and consequences, aggravate mental health conditions, and cause decompensation.
“Disability justice,” Tastrom argues, “requires leadership of the most affected, which means working in solidarity with those on the inside. Abolitionists sometimes get into theoretical debates about how much
energy we should put (if any) into the current conditions of imprisoned people. But, in my experience, the two are rarely in conflict in practice, and there are usually ways to support people currently imprisoned without strengthening the system.”
In writing this book, Tastrom reports being appreciative of previous works. Accordingly, she identifies 10 principles of disability justice originally articulated by Patty Berne in the reader, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People; A Disability Justice Primer. These ten principles include: 1. Intersectionality (the ways identities intersect and overlap); 2. Leadership of the most affected (those
with lived experience); 3. Anti-capitalism (which stresses the ability to produce over all else); 4. Cross-movement organizing (working with other marginalized communities to build collective power); 5. Wholeness (treating disabled people as actual people); 6. Sustainability (avoiding burnout); 7. Cross-disability solidarity (the liberation of all disabled people, not just some); 8. Interdependence (caring for each other); 9. Collective access (everyone being at the table); and 10. Collective liberation (systems themselves are the problem).
