Disability and Abolition w/ Liat Ben-Moshe (01/26/23)
Beatrice speaks with Liat Ben-Moshe about lessons we can draw from linking disability justice with abolition, the threat posed by moves like California's CARE courts and Eric Adams's involuntary hospitalization policies, and revisit her 2020 book Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition.
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)
Liat Ben-Moshe 0:01
Think about how radical that notion is to come and say, close it all down. This idea of caging people, warehousing people, for anything, including the fact that they're different or disabled, it's violence. shut it all down. Think about like how radical that is and think about the fact that it worked.
[intro music]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:49
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Today, I'm really excited to have this guest back on the show. She is, in my opinion, one of the most important thinkers on the intersection of disability, madness, incarceration and abolition. Liat Ben-Moshe is the author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, which came out in 2020, and which she actually came on the show to discuss way back when. But this book is so important, and so I asked her back to revisit Decarcerating Disability in the context of, well, I mean, everything that has happened in the last three years, including the pandemic, and also the growing momentum of abolitionist thought in the United States.
So, Liat, welcome back to the Death Panel. It's so nice to have you here.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:59
It's so, so great to be here. I'm very thankful that I get a second chance [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:05
Well, Liat, thank you so much for coming back. Since we first had you on in 2020, it has honestly been one of the great honors of my life to get to work with you and Dean Spade on the Marta Russell Symposium for Law in Political Economy Project, and to get to know you better personally, in addition to thinking with your tremendous body of work. And your 2020 book, Decarcerating Disability, is such an important text. It's a must read if you even have, you know, any passing interest in disability, incarceration, public policy, or the labor movement, frankly. So I know it's been a while, but for folks who have not read your book, and for those who haven't in a while, do you mind sort of starting out by talking about the overall framing of the book, you know, what you wrote about and why? And really, for the sake of context, maybe we could also talk about, you know, how your argument and the history that you discuss in your analysis either reflects, refutes, or rejects dominant understandings or theories or approaches to these topics, especially in the context of both disability and abolition.
And the reason why is because your work and analysis has been so important in shaping how we talk about so many things on the podcast and in Artie and my work in general. So for listeners whose first or early exposures to either disability, or abolition, was through Death Panel or Health Communism, you know, I want them to know how much of that nuance and difference in the way that we talk about things is specifically indebted to some of the pathbreaking that happens in your work. So yeah, so I'd love for them to get a sense for how the way you talk about this is actually really different. For example, you know, union opposition to deinstitutionalization, or the way that we can think about this as a social movement for carceral abolition, because some of the book's most important lessons for me stem from that. And I hear from folks all of the time, who say, for example, you know, I wanted to read more about disability, and I searched for books at the library, and there weren't many, so I just picked the first one. And I was really surprised to find very pro carceral or pro capitalist disability theory, narrative or history. So, you know, I really want to make sure that we're sort of putting your work in the context and giving it the respect that it deserves.
Liat Ben-Moshe 4:28
Thank you for that. So the book really came from that impetus. I don't know if I said it the last time I was on, but you know, it's a book that in many ways I didn't think I would be the person to write. But it's a book that I think was important to have. So for many years, I kind of pushed the envelope either towards other people that were more entrenched in the movement, or elders or more -- and by movement, I mean either abolition movements, or deinstitutionalization movements, disability movements, and kind of try to find the people that are key to the intersection of kind of radical disability politics, deinstitutionalization, anti-psychiatry, and prison abolition. And over the years, it kind of became -- I became kind of a carrier of a lot of people's knowledges, movement knowledge, and also just, you know, research, actual data and so on. So, that's kind of how I became the writer of this book.
So it's a book about a political project that I didn't create, obviously, like, I'm just trying to be the bridge that connects these movements. And so again, in a time that I thought, you know, for many years that it will be taken up, and it's kind of so obvious, and through giving talks, and through just being in movements, it became clear to me kind of like what you're saying, that the obvious to me was not the obvious to other people. And so, for example, just going off of your example of somebody picking a book in the library, even people who are disabled, including myself, as a disabled person, don't necessarily understand disability is political, right? Like being disabled, or even just having an impairment, doesn't make one a political thinker of disability. And so if you were to go to the library and just pick a disability book, that would not be necessarily a thing that would politicize you to disability, like a history of resistance, or disability as a culture, or, you know, the really -- the rich history of resisting psychiatry or, you know, all of those things. And so I feel that that is knowledge that needs to be circulated.
And certainly some of us, you know, like, for example, I live in Chicago. I know, it's similar in New York, San Francisco, there's like several places in the US that have very vibrant disability culture, which again, doesn't mean that everybody in Chicago is politicized as disabled, even if they have disabilities. But we are very privileged to have access to those communities those knowledges, but for the most -- you know, most people are not privileged to have that. And so I think it's really important to have, you know, your podcast, to have books, to have, you know, a variety of ways of politicizing one's identity or social location, including as a disabled person. So the goal of the book, you know, in short, is really to connect two movements that haven't been really connected in this kind of way, in the way of radical politics. And those are the disability movement, especially deinstitutionalization, and prison abolition. And by deinstitutionalisation, for people who haven't kind of encountered that before, or just as a reminder, I mean, three things: I mean, the closure of psychiatric facilities, but also institutions for people with intellectual or developmental disability, so basically, disability spaces of confinement. So that's one.
The second thing is where did the people end up after the closure, which is the movement of people into community living outside of the walls of institutions and psych hospitals. And then thirdly, to me, deinstitutionalization is a mindset. It's a logic, it's a social movement. And so the book really focuses on the parts of deinstitutionalization, which is not all of it, but the parts of deinstitutionalization that were more abolitionary, or try to be more abolitionary, and to kind of discuss the connections and differences between reform and abolition, what parts of deinstitutionalization were abolitionary, what parts were about logics, what parts were pushed by social movements, like anti-psychiatry, self advocacy, which is the movement of people with intellectual disabilities who are fighting for social change, and, you know, disability rights movements more broadly. And to connect all that, or to understand it as also a precursor to, or a contemporary example of abolition. And so I also -- you know, the second goal of the book is to connect things like the rise of incarceration to -- or refute the connection between the rise in incarceration and this process of, and the logic of deinstitutionalization.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:52
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we should definitely actually spend some time on that misunderstanding specifically. But I really appreciated the way that you put that and the framing of kind of like wanting to be the bridge, and waiting for this book to be written and sort of seeking it out and then winding up with all of the materials, you know, all of the work, you know, sort of being done towards this project that you ultimately ended up writing yourself. And I think, you know, this -- the kind of idea of like what becomes obvious and what becomes like the grounding of the ways that we start to look and think about our lives differently, and use political and social theory to re-understand and reinterpret all sorts of things, whether that's the process of applying for welfare benefits, or the ways that you interact with your employer, or your insurance company, you know, these are all things that we care a lot about sort of investigating and teasing apart the nuance of on this show, and obviously, because of our interest and focus of both abolition and disability, it's been super important and sort of framed a lot of the ways that we approach things. But I think that people do assume that because we're sort of so adamant about doing things a very specific, sort of precise way, that this is the way that everybody thinks about it. But it's not. You know, disability is not a kind of automatic identity that you like receive like a politics card as soon as you become disabled, you know, and then -- and you sort of transforms your world. Like these things -- that's magical thinking. That's not really how life works. That's not how any of this actually works.
And so I think it's just really great to get a chance to think about also the role that this book has had in actually sort of succeeding in its goals, which in so many ways, are really focused on trying to set forth a couple of really important key narratives. You know, the idea that deinstitutionalization should be thought of on the continuum of prison industrial complex abolition is actually a very -- you know, it's a very different way than like how you'll hear it framed if you look at like pretty much any mainstream approach to discussing the deinstitutionalization movement. I mean, the kind of dominant way of thinking about this deals a lot with like the concepts of sort of medicalization shifting -- and can we actually get into the kind of way this is thought of as happening? And, you know, what are the kind of false myths about deinstitutionalization? Not just the fact that it sort of was over, or successful or whatever, but sort of what are the ways that we actually sort of talk about it, that both kind of depoliticize it, and also sort of silo it off from the other things that are contingent with its actual existence?
Liat Ben-Moshe 12:41
Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, I think so. I don't think it's -- well, I should say, the thing that kind of bothered me the most is not so much the siloing, although that's definitely happening, but it's the blaming. So it's kind of taking deinstitutionalization as a scapegoat for so many social problems, including the rise in incarceration. The idea, okay, institutions closed down, and then people ended up in jails and prisons, people with disabilities, especially people with psychiatric disabilities, and so on. But it's really -- tt's even larger than that. It's like to blame deinstitutionalization for really a variety of social issues that are caused by systemic things like white supremacy, neoliberalism, you know, the connection between medicalization and capitalism, which of course, you discuss a lot in the book, in your book, Health Communism, and all of those things are, it just -- it's such an easy kind of target. But as we say, in social sciences, you know, correlation is not causation, right? Just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean one made the other thing happen. And so what I really felt strongly about is to understand -- not to celebrate deinstitutionalization necessarily, like without talking about its pitfalls. I mean, of course, I talk a lot in the book about the pitfalls of a variety of cases within deinstituationalization, right? Like, we have to understand the actual data, like what happened, be specific with this and how it did go wrong, or could be better and so on. These are the lessons that we learn.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:30
This is how we learn. Yeah.
Liat Ben-Moshe 14:32
And this is what we learned for doing abolition. And this is the same for those of us who do prison abolition, you know, if we are very successful in closing a site of imprisonment, but then people end up incarcerated in a different site of imprisonment. I mean, this is a case in which we learn. And so the analysis is, of course, also about learning from the pitfalls, and some of them are ideological pitfalls, like you were talking earlier about labor and parents, and people who resist, and still resist deinstitutionalization today, but it's also to say, why are we so okay, and like to use the word common sense, why is it so common sense that deinitialization failed, right? That it failed. People ended up in the streets and with nothing and blah, blah, blah. And to me that is, of course, super dangerous. First of all this is -- the first thing is that it's really interesting, right, as a researcher, is to be like, well, if everybody thinks A, like why do they think like that? And then you realize that the thought processes are not actually based on facts. They're based on fears, or they're based on narratives that they heard. They're based on these kind of stories. And, secondly, to understand the danger of those stories, right, like, what does it mean? Well, the danger is it's anti-labor, it's anti-feminist, it's really anti-disability. It's anti-liberation, it's -- and so on, and so on. And then to kind of understand, what is the underpinning of these stories of the failure of deinstitutionalization? Like, to me that was kind of one of the goals.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 16:13
No, and I think it's one of those things where sometimes people might say, you know, oh, you're just being pedantic, like why does it matter to sort of set the record straight on deinstitutionalization? Why does it matter to sort of enforce the nuance and really, you know, approach these things with precision in mind. I mean, there was something you said to me in the conversation we had about the book the first time in 2020 about, you know, precision is really important, because the point is to learn from these things, it's to learn from these mistakes. And, you know, how are we supposed to learn if we like have the wrong story? Like there is no right lesson that can be pulled from the wrong story, and this kind of just so perspective of, oh, well, we closed institutions, and then the prisons filled up.
So if you want to like fix the problem of prisons, then your only logical answer becomes, oh, well, time to reopen the institutions. And this is what we've seen Eric Adams do. This is what we're seeing in California with the CARE Court, you know. Eric Adams was like on national TV running for mayor of New York, saying that we overreacted to Willowbrook and that deinstitutionalization was a mistake, right. And these are opinions that like we have seen from all sorts of New York politicians from the 1950s through the 1980s. But for a while, you know, there's been a kind of like, dominant common sense consensus that this is a process that's like finished and done in the past, but as you actually sort of really foreground in the book, because of this kind of way of understanding deinstitutionalization, you know, not as a kind of legal phenomena or a policy phenomenon, but as a social movement also, helps us understand how the past is also sort of telling us about the future, right, which is something you say, I think, actually right, very early on in the introduction of Decarcerating Disability, which is like when we're looking at the past, we're also looking for lessons.
And that's why it's really important to actually look at this -- you know, not just one attempt at closing institutions, but a huge transformation in the entire way that we structured so many sites of care, that it wasn't one transformation, but hundreds and thousands of different policy transformations, and behavioral transformations, and transformations in standards of care, and things that happened in the context of organizing. And I think one of the things that's so wonderful about your book is that Decarcerating Disability really does with so much precision, show you how complicated this was and why it's so important to look to deinstitutionalization specifically in the United States to sort of understand not just like how society values disability, but like how the federal government works and what fiscal federalism is, and sort of why we're seeing so many other sort of ways that policy and austerity have gone wrong in other arenas, because actually in the context of deinstitutionalization, probably because no one gives a shit about disabled people, some of those contradictions are just like right out there laying on the table.
Liat Ben-Moshe 19:31
Well, and also to understand why people are still vilifying it today, because like you're saying, it's radical, you know, it was a radical transformation. And so I think this is one of the things that we're losing in the kind of like common narrative about it, the Eric Adams and some other people we should kind of talk about in a second, but the vilification of it, right, is because it worked. It's because it's powerful. You know, this is 2023. The heyday of deinstitutionalization in mental health was in the 60s and 70s. And of course, in many states, you know, to this day, we're still fighting for deinstitutionalization, so it's absolutely an ongoing thing. And in the field of intellectual disabilities, you know, it was more starting in kind of like the mid 70s, then 80s, when we started to see more closure of institutions. And, again, we are in 2023.
And so think about like the lore and the power, first of all, of these kind of pervasive narratives of failure, but also of blaming something. And I think the only reason is because it worked, right? It was a radical transformation, like you're saying, a transformation in -- also in ideology, in beliefs, in the way that we kind of treat people. And some of the things, you know, you called it earlier, like the mistakes of deinstitutionalization, some of it were intentional, like I don't think they were mistakes. They were a way of the -- then, the beginning, of what we today, of course, would call neoliberalism -- by then, I mean, 70s -- the beginning of neoliberalism, those were intentional, right? I mean, closing institution because of austerity, because we don't, or because the government doesn't want to put in any money into things like peer support, community mental health, and so on. That is still the case today. So that's not -- wasn't a mistake, I mean, that activists made. I mean, activists were very clear about what they want. The shift monetarily just didn't happen. The money went to corrections, the money went to the rise in incarceration. And that's where the money still is at. So it's not like the money went away. I mean, that's another fallacy, of course, of the way neoliberalism works.
But I think, you know, those, -- that's where it kind of, like you were saying, that the nuance like really matter. And then secondly, this idea -- secondly, I mean, why this is radical, why deinstitutionalization is radical, is because it points to, like you were saying earlier, that things like institutionalization, and prisons as well, people are like, oh, it's always been here. When people started pushing for the closure, if you can kind of imagine living in that era, and having people, including people that you perhaps respect, starting with professionals, advocates, pushed for the closure of all institutions for people with disabilities. Think about how that sounded for like kind of the average person, and of course, the policy people who were very much against it, and are still against it. And think about how radical that notion is to come and say, close it all down. This idea of caging people, warehousing people, for anything, including the fact that they're different or disabled, is nonsensical. It's violent. Shut it all down. And think about like how radical that is, and think about the fact that it worked. And so if we understand it like that, we understand that people understood and still understand, you know, prisons, institutions as a contingency. It's not common sense. It's not something that always been here. And it's something that we can live without. And then it makes a lot of sense to understand what's going on right now with the bring back the asylum, Eric Adams, and then the CARE Courts in California, which I hope we get to talk to you, but it kind of makes more sense.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 23:47
No, absolutely. And I think if we think about in terms of really sort of what begin to be the dominant logics and sort of priorities that emerge, and the patterns that emerge in the ways that, for example, attempts at sort of reestablishing care for people who have been freed from various institutions, sort of get sucked up and transformed into things that, you know, are still obviously sort of existing, but that exist in this much more decentralized way. We also saw like a massive shift in the sort of types of care that certain populations have access to changing as a result of deinstitutionalization, but not being replaced as the result of specific policy logics and ideology about sort of facing a fiscal crisis and making a decision about sort of where to cut it, right, because of things like the kind of fiscal ideologies of welfare reform and you know, even the inspiration behind certain policies, like the ADA, for some being oh well, we can kick people off of the welfare rolls, like this is great.
And so we sort of see, I think, also the connections emerge between some of the kinds of prejudicial attitudes towards disability and the economic frameworks with which we are all sort of made to understand disability at a cultural and at a kind of community level, and how they also relate to the history of deinstitutionalization. How a lot of these kind of logics of not just like policy austerity, but just the kind of austerity brain mindset of approaching disabled people, or approaching things like requests for accommodation and sort of framing it as already too much, right? And that how this sort of actually does connect into these broader ways that disability was talked about in the context of like, do we or do we not sort of deinstitutionalize, as this, you know, decades-long process played out, which was concurrent with policy sort of evolving and developing in some very specific ways at the same time. And it ultimately tells us so much about the priorities of systems of governance in the United States, and so many sort of different positions on things like spending and taxes and zoning, right? I mean, and that's why this book is so wonderful, because it really helps you sort of understand also how really, this kind of was so embedded within the economy, which makes it almost like more impressive and radical that it was able to be sort of dismantled, actually, in the way that it was.
Liat Ben-Moshe 26:21
Yeah, and I agree, and I think that, you know, two things kind of come to mind as examples of what you're saying. So one is, like I was saying, that there were two deinstitutionalizations really, one in psychiatric disabilities and one in I/DD. And I want to emphasize that because policy wise, they worked through often different funding streams. But in terms of I/DD, in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities, because we can kind of track or surveil the recipients, people who receive benefits for having intellectual and developmental disability label from the state, we can kind of see how the process of deinstitutionalization worked very, very specifically. And so through that, just like one example, you know, we know that now the vast majority of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the last I checked, it was over 70%, now don't live in any kind of congregate facility, nor even in kind of smaller facilities. They mostly live with a family member at home.
And so the example here is that you would think that then the money from closing down these very costly institutions that were run by the state, you would think that the money would then go to their care at home, right? But of course, that's not the case, because I said family members, but it's usually mothers, or kind of siblings or other family members, that of course, the labor is never paid. So in this case, we can see how deinstitutionalization is a feminist issue, and related to kind of feminist labor politics, and how, you know, within kind of disability politics, we have to pay attention to that arena as well. And so when people advocated for the closure of these institutions, what they were hoping for included that, including supports for people at home. It didn't mean state abandonment, and it also didn't mean -- which is, you know, of course, kind of Ruthie's term that she uses, like organized abandonment, but also it didn't mean extractive abandonment, you know, the term that you're using in your book, meaning that it wasn't an opening for these for-profit entities to then come and incarcerate basically disabled people in group homes, for example, or nursing homes, right? But in essence, that is what happened. So some of it you can kind of, again, chalk to this idea of naivete, right, of people, some of it were just economic factors that weren't even at play then, you know?
There weren't like these -- this complex -- industrial complex -- nursing home industrial complex wasn't like as strong as it is now. And so it's not like they could have not been predicted, but some of it could have, which leads me to the second point, which is, you know, the disability rights movement has done a lot, including this, including deinstitutionalization, pushing for it. And I wouldn't be where I am right now, meaning like working in a university, having my entire K through 12 education, none of it was in kind of disability, special schools and so on. I wouldn't have that life if it weren't for disability rights movement. So I just wanted to say that. But some of what disability rights movements did also had a lot to do with these kinds of economic -- political, economic changes that you just talked about, and I want to make sure that we understand that as well. Meaning that some of the things that was pushed for was this inclusion into a really, excuse me, fucked up system of both employment, you know, kind of idealization of capitalism, of racial capitalism. And in that sense, of course, you know, things like the ADA [laughing], the Americans with Disabilities Act, are not going to be the savior of this, because they are the ones that entrench that status quo, right? So I think that it's really important then to understand how kind of the pitfall of rights approaches have been in kind of enshrining political economic neoliberal ideas, like choice and rights and cost effectiveness, you know, and all of that, as if they're common sense and they have always been here, and this is the frame we need to think through.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:02
Natural. They sprung forth out of the ground, fully formed.
Liat Ben-Moshe 31:07
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:09
So well put. No, and these are two fantastic examples. I mean, this is something that, you know, it's important to understand sort of what was the landscape, right, that the disability rights movement actually is sort of coming into, in order to try and achieve deinstitutionalization, when we critique it, right, because one of the things that's really difficult from the perspective of like someone born the year the ADA passed, right, is that, you know, my reference point for growing up and living around and with disabled people, and as a disabled person, like none of that has -- bears very little resemblance to like the childhood or life I would have had as a young adult, if I had been born in the 50s, or 60s, or 70s, right. And so it can be difficult sometimes to like reconcile these kinds of moments where we have to recognize the fact that like it's a lot more messy, and complicated, and sort of interconnected than oftentimes, I think we mythologize it as a much more sort of simple, almost romanticized understanding of how change happens, where it sort of progresses forward linearly, right, from like A to B to C. And this is more, you know, a process of -- a very messy process of all sorts of different things happening at once, and nothing progresses really linearly.
And I think one of the things that's useful also in terms of how the book both can make interventions, how Decarcerating Disability can make interventions in understanding the kind of logics that ended or perpetuated deinstitutionalization, and kind of use that as a way to understand certain aspects of disability and how care infrastructure is developed. There are also a lot of lessons towards understanding the sort of development of the prison-industrial complex and of the development of mass incarceration, and also of the kind of policing of public space and the impulse of politicians towards, you know, really being attracted to laws that are about, you know, really removing poor people from public space and sort of removing people from view, who are seen as not part of the "we," who are seen as not part of the body politic. So I wonder if we can get into a little bit sort of the flip side, looking at the more overtly carceral aspects of the kind of lessons that your book can teach us, you know, from the disability side, back over into the carceral side.
Liat Ben-Moshe 33:40
Yes, I think that would be really important. And definitely in lieu of, and maybe that's your next question, but maybe, definitely, in lieu of you were alluding to earlier, what's going on right now in New York and California, and elsewhere. So I would say, there's been a resurgence that I haven't seen -- I mean, it never went away, it never went away. But certainly in the last few years, there's been a resurgence that the quantity of it's, not quality, but quantity of it, I haven't seen since probably the 80s, of trying to increase civil commitments, involuntary civil commitments through policy legislation and, you know, a variety of kind of like local means of that nature. And so in California, that took the form of what is called CARE Courts, and the CARE is an acronym. But, you know, the point of it is, of course, to -- it's a carceral, like you were saying, approach to supposedly help people who are housing insecure. And in New York, it's a very kind of like Giuliani effort [laughing], I mean incredibly, it's not even --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:58
It's like Mario Cuomo returns.
Liat Ben-Moshe 35:01
I think it's -- it's pre, you know, it's pre that. It's this kind of idea of, I'm the mayor, I can get rid of people on the streets without any accountability or, you know, resistance and so on. And without any kind of root understanding of like any root causes, or trying to even understand any kind of root causes. And what I mean, to be very, very specific, what I mean by resurgence is that nexus of not just housing insecurity, because, of course, that has risen prior to right now, but the connection between housing insecurity and "mental illness," that's what I'm talking about in terms of the nexus that is rising, like that narrative again, like from the 80s. So in the 80s, New York had a bunch of these kind of carceral initiatives, particularly for getting rid of people that lived in that intersection of being housing insecure, and being "mentally ill." And we're seeing that now in totally full force across the country. And particularly, like I said, in New York and California, that has kind of come through very, very direct policy. And yeah, I don't know where you kind of want to go with this, but there is a lot of resistance to it, as well.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:22
So one of the sort of things that makes looking back at Decarcerating Disability from our current moment, you know, just so salient is in the context of this kind of resurgence of what we've been calling and what we've referred to as a sort of carceral saneist policy approach, and this is building on an idea that you talk about in the book, of carceral saneism, and it's a really sort of important concept to or analysis on the show, and also to the way that we've talked about this issue specifically. But you know, beyond that, there are a lot of things that are just kind of eerie, that when you're like looking at the current moment and you're considering kind of the way that this has escalated in the last 10 years, but particularly since the beginning of the pandemic, you know, those trends and those threads that you were really sort of highlighting, talking about our current moment, in Decarcerating Disability, have sort of come to pass in a terrifying way and really just kind of developed. So do you mind talking a little bit about sort of what brought you to wanting to sort of bring in and theorize and sort of talk about the concept of carceral saneism, and sort of what underlies that analysis, and then talk about also perhaps how you feel about like where we've found ourselves at, and how, three years later, considering the context of like how so much of what's going on is really, you know, reflected in a lot of the things that your book is dealing with.
Liat Ben-Moshe 37:52
So, the book came out in 2020. And there was already a lot of examples of, you know, what I would call carceral saneism or carceral ableism. For people who don't know what those words are, just by the way, saneism is oppression based on this imperative to be sane, to be rational, to be not mad, or crazy, or psychiatrically disabled. So of course, saneism is something that particularly people who are psychiatrized face, but really is detrimental to all of us. And of course, ableism is oppression based on disability, perceived or otherwise, or lived, and so on. So what I mean by carceral saneism and ableism is this kind of idea and practice and belief that people with disabilities need to be protected or need kind of extra protection. And this is where the CARE Court, for example, would be an example of that, right? Not just the word CARE [laughing], but also, it's a kind of benevolent -- seemingly benevolent approach to carcerality. So it's not an approach that says, kind of like beats you over the head, you're disposable, let's get rid of you in an asylum. Although, honestly, some of that is literally what's happening in New York.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:19
No, it's a moral mandate to, "deliver for our most vulnerable, a compassionate new vision."
Liat Ben-Moshe 39:27
Is that from the CARE Courts or --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:29
That's from Eric Adams directly, yeah.
Liat Ben-Moshe 39:32
Eric, okay. So you know, some of the rhetoric I think, is really, honestly in other interviews, like it's not even hidden, and then some of it is like this, again, this like benevolent, caring approach, for caring for our most marginalized and so on. People who cannot care for themselves or some other --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:53
Here's a Newsom statement, "CARE Court is a paradigm shift, providing housing and services in the community where people can heal and not behind locked walls of institutions and prisons." That's from August 30th.
Liat Ben-Moshe 40:06
[laughing] And yet it's a court.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:08
Yeah. Not an institution, not a prison, but a secret third thing.
Liat Ben-Moshe 40:13
Exactly, which is supposedly non-carceral. So exactly. That was a great quote -- I mean, awful quotes. And so you know, what I want to kind of warn against with that concept of carceral saneism and carceral ableism, is the carceral nature of these, "benevolent" approaches, right? That they're absolutely not -- they're done in our name, right, of disabled people, of mad people, self advocates and so on. But of course, they are not meant for us. They are not there for our liberation. And so it's kind of a warning cry, or you can call it a litmus test, right? I mean, in abolitinary circle, we have a lot of these kind of like litmus test, is it reformist, or is it abolition, you know, there's variety of ways in which we talk about the difference between those two. But I wanted to bring in carceral saneism and ableism as kind of more specific examples of that, right? Like how it's a thing that supposedly looks benevolent or useful, is actually incredibly ableist, incredibly violent, harmful for the lives of disabled or psychiatrically labeled people, and is also carceral. And so the CARE Courts are absolutely an example of that. And you know, another example we might take on, you know, recently there was a New York Times article, they did a whole interview with E. Fuller Torrey, who, of course, very notorious, and one of the people that I write against like in the book, against him and his theories and his Treatment Advocacy Center, that people think is like a whole enterprise, but it's really him in different --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:09
[whisper laughing] It's just him.
Liat Ben-Moshe 42:10
Yeah, it really is. And some, you know, kind of collaborators, some of them long have died. But he's still here. And he's still espousing the same really, really dangerous ideas about the connection between housing insecurity, "mental illness," and why people need to be incarcerated, particularly in psychiatric institutions. And E., now, you know, in the interview, it just came out as people who he worked with as kind of interns in the center, are the people who are actually advising Mayor Adams, and you know, that the connection is very clear. And so I think that that is, again, something that I write about in the book, as something that's happening in the 70s and 80s, right, the beginning of this narrative -- not beginning, just an intensification of this narrative. And now how we see kind of the rise of it in the 2020s, coming full force, but I do want to also say that there is a lot of resistance to that narrative. So I don't want to just leave it a, oh, carcerality is here to get us. There's a lot of resistance to this narrative. And so I think it's really important to kind of note that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 43:30
And I think it's not just people who are clued in and sort of thinking about disability theory. I think a lot of these kinds of frameworks, you know, people do see the way that police are interacting with folks on the street, and, you know, I think it's one of those kinds of things where it's not necessarily like self evident or obvious that this is not going to be a good thing. But I think that it is, in some sense, a kind of accessible thing that the public might approach with mistrust, right, and sort of understanding and locating, you know, that distrust within a broader, longer history of policies like this that, you know, frankly, it echoes back to things, like I'm thinking about like soundness determination courts and the kinds of legal proceedings that were happening in the South, where slaves were being sort of subjected to medical -- enslaved people were being subjected to medical and legal authority and sort of judged their like value, their economic worth was judged based on these evaluations of their soundness, or their sanity, and that was all sort of relative to these very sort of bizarre and quite arbitrary race science kind of guidelines, right.
And so you have this idea of, in terms of the CARE Court specifically, making an intervention when people can't make decisions for themselves or when they've refused other services, and creating what is essentially a kind of compulsory only pathway. And in the case of New York, sort of trying to expand and flex some of these decisions about when an involuntary commitment is appropriate to match some of the standards in other states in the United States, because as you said earlier, you know, deinstitutionalization was really patchy. And one of the things that's also really patchy is these laws from state to state, and sometimes county to county in the United States, really vary when it comes to sort of what rights and protections you have from involuntary hospitalization. And so, really, like what these policies are doing, right, is proposing to roll back decades of progress and of hard won, you know, very small gains that I think we're sort of seeing framed as public safety, right. And when we think about what this means within a larger historical context, carceral ableism and carceral saneism become really helpful for understanding it not just as like bad actors. It's not just like Eric Adams is a bad mayor, though he is, or like Gavin Newsom sucks, though he does. It's also about this being a kind of contingent policy logic. This is a way that as a state, we think about various groups of labelled people.
Liat Ben-Moshe 46:23
Right. And, you know, you talk about in your book, like the kind of deserving, undeserving, these hierarchies of disposability, and I agree that this also comes from this, basically, you know, eugenicist logic that's very entrenched, of course, in colonialism, white supremacy, and it finds its way, as a logic, of course, to be incredibly kind of colonial racist, and so on, but also in its effects, meaning, we see right now in New York, like the civil commitments, there's total overrepresentation of people of color, particularly Black, in terms of who's getting civilly committed right now, right. So it's not just in terms of the logic itself, which of course, it is white supremacist, colonial and so on. But the effects of it are very uneven. So it's not like everybody gets sweeped in the same kind of way, right. So I think that those are really important to note.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 47:29
Absolutely. And I think it also layers with the sort of concentration that we see in Rikers, in the way that like the bail system also concentrates along uneven racial lines, forcing sort of more people who are getting picked up, who are getting -- you know, it is -- to place it actually, within this kind of broader logic of racial capitalism is, I think, really important. One of the things that I wanted to sort of make sure that we got a chance to talk about was some of the kind of lessons that deinstitutionalization can have towards current movements for abolition, because we sort of talked about, you know, the benefits of sort of thinking about deinstitutionalization not as like a movement of professionals but as a social movement. But also I want to think about sort of, what about the success of deinstitutionalization, about that radicalism, not being something that was the kind of liability that we're often told, you know, tone down your rhetoric, right, like, tone down your ask in advance. Like in a lot of ways, the book over and over teaches you these wonderful lessons about why you shouldn't compromise your ideology and your rhetoric in your movement work. So I wonder if we could just sort of, as a last topic, talk for a second about some of the wonderful lessons of like deinstitutionalization that kind of teach us about like what actually is possible in our current moment.
Liat Ben-Moshe 48:52
Sure. Sure. I think that, you know, one of the things that was really important to me, again, was to talk about the kind of radical potential of deinstitutionalization, which was not all of the ways things were closed, but I'm talking about the abolitionary aspect. And really, I would say, there's been always this kind of pendulum within deinstitutionalization between, you know, reform and abolition. And I would say one of the lessons of deinstitutionalization is the way that it came about, which is not just through kind of policy closure of facilities based on fact we don't have money, lawsuits, and so on. But it was a change in ideology. And it really wasn't until people themselves, like within self advocacy, anti-psychiatry, disability movements, came to the - to kind of an abolitionary mindset, if you will, that we started to see that, right?
So, just to give an example, you know, in deinstitutionalization, there is -- it still exists, like this notion of a continuum of care, or the least restrictive environment, in which people, particularly parents, some professionals, believe that there's a whole spectrum of placements where people with disabilities can be. One of them is institutionalization, or special facilities or so on. And on the other side is living independently, like with supports or without supports, depending on what the person needs. And within that spectrum, there's also a lot of other things, like group homes, so on. And deinstitutionalization as an abolitionary demand was about dismantling that idea, is about saying there should not be any continuum of that nature, I mean, kind of a carceral continuum of disability, it should be no institutions, right. And this is what the self advocacy movement have said, kind of early on, that they called for the closure of all residential institutions for people with disabilities, and they defined institution very broadly, by the way, which is basically any setting or place in which one doesn't make decisions about their own life.
And so, you know, of course, group homes would be a part of it, and so on. So I think, you know, that is definitely a lesson, is to think about abolition, from the get go, right? Closure by itself of a facility is not enough, right? Another lesson is a lot of the times people talk about, well, who who can be decarcerated, right, like some people are just not going to make it on the outside. In the disability world or in the prison world, it's, well, some people have to be kind of confined for our own safety, right, like serial killers, and you know, I mean -- I'm using this all with double quotes, of course.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:09
Air quotes, yeah.
Liat Ben-Moshe 52:10
Exactly, exactly. And so we have these like figures in the prison arena, it's the non-non-non, right, like non-violent, non-sex offender, and so on. And in disability world, is like the severe cases, right? Like those for sure, I'm saying facetiously, cannot be decarcerated, cannot live on the outside, for own safety, for their own good. But what deinstitutionalization, I think, showed us is that -- the fallacy of that approach. And in fact, for example, when institutions in Vermont closed, this is very early on the 70s, when they closed kind of major institution in Vermont, they decarcerated the people with the "more care needs," right, like what we call severe disability, people with more complex medical needs, first. And in the disability -- I'm sorry, in the prison arena, we've seen that as well, particularly with people who work around, "violent offenders."
And so if you start with the cases that you think are harder, that kind of paves the way towards abolition. So this idea, you know, something that we can learn is that people who advocate now, we should be actually focusing on at least at the same time, we should do all the things at the same time, but we should definitely also focus on, and early on, on people that we think have more complex, kind of either care needs or support needs, and etc. So, you know, I think that that's two lessons. There's a lot more lessons, you know, in the book.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:51
Oh, there's so many. Yes.
Liat Ben-Moshe 53:53
Including about what abolition is, you know, which I call dis-epistemology, you know, letting go of particular ways of knowing. There's lessons about, you know, in some ways, the most successful deinstitutionalization has been no new admissions, so it's really about prevention, you know, that we could take back into like the prison arena as well. So I can go on and on. But, yeah, there's a lot that we can learn.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:20
And one that comes to mind too, is the kind of example of public opinion, which I think is one that applies so much also to the pandemic. Actually, all of this applies also to the pandemic, especially kind of the idea of like how do we deal with the virus? Well, maybe we should center the needs of the people who need the most accommodations in public space, and then that'll just make the space safe for everyone. No, we're going to do the opposite. Okay, great. Like obviously, I'm being sarcastic there. But, you know --
Liat Ben-Moshe 54:53
But that's also -- I'm sorry to cut you off -- I mean, that's exactly right, and that's exactly -- you know, has been why I think the tenet of Black Lives Matters is like so, so, so important, right? I think that this is exactly this kind of like, Black feminist approach to liberation, that I think is so central to the kind of freedom dreams that we have with abolition.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:18
And I think also in this sort of moment, like looking back at the history of deinstitutionalization, I think it's obviously frustrating that in this current moment, we're seeing challenges to this kind of progress, right. But at the same time, like I hope that this perspective also gives the folks who are resisting now, some like confidence, and a little of that, like, you know, that rage -- that little rage you need to just keep you going, right? Because these struggles are long-term, but like just because we can look back at history for lessons for our current moment, or for the future, like doesn't mean that we're sort of on this, like, history is always gonna repeat itself. It's futile. It's like, no, there are like great lessons here. And like, we have to do what we can with the time that we have like right now. And Decarcerating Disability just has so many wonderful and important lessons.
I mean, this was the first book that our server's reading group read as a whole book. Before this, we had read like a bunch of different essays and sort of things on a theme, and it was changing. But this was like the first book that we were like, okay, this is the one that we're going to read start to finish. And it was such a wonderful experience, because we started in, I think, the late summer of 2020. And as things started already reopening in the United States, because if we recall, this kind of like idea of like long-term lockdowns in the US never actually happened. It was such an important text. And we were seeing echoes everywhere in the kind of like anti-mask rhetoric that was already popping up in 2020, echoes of these kinds of same things that are just all over Decarcerating Disability, and there are just so many lessons in this book. And also, it's just -- I reread it for the sixth time to prepare for this, and it just was like overwhelming also how much work went into this over the years, you know, and I really also appreciate so much that you were willing to sort of sit down and talk about it this many years later, too.
Liat Ben-Moshe 57:22
Well, it's a total honor to have the work read and engaged with in the way that you have. And that is really, you know, I think more than what any author strives for, right, is to have people engage in the work, to take kind of the useful part, to activate it. Right, like to activate it like in your own lives.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 57:46
To use it, yeah.
Liat Ben-Moshe 57:47
Exactly, exactly. And certainly, you know, the book came out beginning of COVID, it was written obviously pre-, but I think that this idea of centering knowledges on, and centering freedom on the people who are kind of most oppressed or multiply oppressed, and like we were saying earlier, you know, kind of the adage of Black Lives Matter and feminist Black liberation movements, I hope that, you know, some of those ways that were very visceral, in the beginning of the pandemic, and, of course, still are, I hope that people kind of carry the seeds of that with them, you know, that will be kind of my hope.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:26
I really appreciate the way that you put that, that was beautiful. I mean, I think the lesson that many of us have learned through the pandemic, but which was readily available to many people, particularly if you're looking at the lens, you know, specifically through the lens of disability, is really that normalization is a powerful process, right. And many people don't even realize that they're going through it when they're experiencing it. And I mean, there's often a kind of moment where someone who's disabled, if they're sort of taking a political journey and trying to think through their identity, not just as a kind of identity, but as a kind of location, right, within the state and relative to power, and relative to the sort of political economic landscape, you know, where you have to sort of reckon with your own internalized ableism, with the ways that you just have accepted the kind of common sense understanding of how, you know, you exist, or evaluating like whatever, your performance, or productivity or whatever, you know? Like we all have our own individual shit to work through, if you're gonna like go there.
But it's something that I think in the context of the pandemic, a lot of people have been put in this position where they're kind of seeing for the first time and realizing like that this is a really ongoing and long process, like struggle is long and constant and it's really difficult, but like at the same time, it is a really wonderful and beautiful thing, and like I do think that when I reread this book, it does kind of recapture a lot of the energy of that summer for me. And it does remind me a lot of the reasons why, for example, our Discord community came together the way that it did, because, you know, this book, reading this book together was one of the ways that we really kind of developed our own sociality within the server and started to sort of develop some of our relationships. It changed some of the ways that people were organizing. So it was like a really important kind of text in guiding like the direction of the early formation of the Death Panel server, and it's kind of this really wonderful thing to go back to it and reread it, and to get a chance to talk to you about it. And I really appreciate that. So thank you.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:00:45
Thank you. Thanks for having me again.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:48
No, it's been wonderful. And my final question is, you know, what are you working on now? What are you working on in the future? Unless you don't want to talk about it, which is totally fine, and we can skip that.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:01:00
[laughing] Well, I mean, I'll answer it, like what I'm working on scholarly, because activistly, I'm always going to work on the same thing, which is to liberate people from sites of confinement, to do, you know, whatever is helpful in that way. So that's always an ongoing, of course, thing, whether it's closure hearings, or against the formation of like a new jail, or a policy, or you know, now it's really the rise of civil commitments, the rise of involuntary commitments, and being a part of, you know, campaigns around that.
But in terms of scholarly, some of it is I'm tracing the discourse around violence, particularly in the 70s, and how it was biologized and racialized in very particular ways, in that moment in time. Much smaller kind of genealogical project, right, like always trying to get to kind of the roots of ideas, or the histories of particular ideas and how they kind of came to be. And then I've been for a long time, but not so much in terms of publishing, but for a very long time, kind of thinking through the connection between the way disability is used to wage war and wage peace, if you will, the ways disability is used in anti-war movements, anti-occupation, sometimes anti-colonial. The way it's kind of a trope in those ways, and the way it's also mobilized to wage wars, in particular ways. And so that has been kind of an ongoing project of mine for a long time. And I'm really hoping to have kind of more time to talk about it in a more longform way. So I guess that is the -- watch out for that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:48
Yeah. Watch this space, right? No, you'll have to let me know. Those both sound fantastic. Liat, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. Before we wrap, is there anything we didn't get a chance to get to that you wanted to mention or anything you want to plug?
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:03:03
I want to plug your book.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:04
Aww, thank you.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:03:06
Health Communism. I really think it's wonderful. And I think that it's -- you know, it connects to some of the themes that we, you know, talked about today, but it really is a really great, I would say, also genealogical kind of tracing of some of the ways that we think about health currently, and where it -- kind of where it came from, and particularly the political economic underpinnings of it. So yeah, it's really, really great. I can't wait to teach it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:38
Wow. Thank you, Liat.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:03:40
I want to plug that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:41
That's so -- that means a lot to hear. You know, there was a part of me that was like, what if Liat hates it? She'll tell me, you know.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:03:50
I probably would.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:51
You would.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:03:52
Yeah [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:52
Yeah, you would. But it means a lot to hear that coming from you, Liat. Seriously, you're making me cry. So thank you. I appreciate the feedback on the book. Wow. Well, Liat, thank you so much again. Liat's book is Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition.
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Death Panel 1:05:16
[outro song, "Fire by the River," by Harumi]