LivedX 5: Kochava Lillit 'A Disability Introduction to Transformative Justice’ (Auslan)

- When I talk about the abuse I've experienced as a mad queer crip Jew, the responses run the gauntlet from kind and compassionate to "I can relate," to "you deserved it." When I told my then-girlfriend about the time I was assaulted for stimming in public, she said, "Those people should be in prison." When I talked about the woman who followed me and another disabled friend down several streets to interrogate us about whether we were really disabled and how dare we use things that "real" disabled people might need, another abled friend later said: "If I was there, I would have called the cops." It's meant to be a supportive response. I see your hurt. I understand your pain. That shouldn't have happened to anyone. People shouldn't be allowed to do that. But it doesn't feel supportive because I know that the ideals and ideologies that create a society where ableism is normalized and disabled people devalued and dismissed are intertwined with the ideas behind the system of prisons and police that we have today. Prisons rely on the idea that some people are disposable. The image of the criminal, as someone who has forfeited their rights and deserves to suffer is a major part of modern prison discourse. But the criminal, as they appear in these conversations, is not a coherent concept. Say this to an advocate for prisons and they'll protest. They mean people who break the law should face the consequences. And that's all they mean by criminal: a person who breaks the law. Have you ever pirated a movie? Crossed the road against a red light, because it was late and there are no cars anyway? Then you have broken the law and you are criminal. So am I. So are of the people who say that people who break the law should face the consequences, because they're criminals, because they don't really mean people who break the law. Everyone breaks some laws some time. They mean criminals, scary people, people you wouldn't want to be around. Why? That depends who's speaking. Often, it means queer people, people of colour, especially black people, disabled people, especially mentally ill people, poor people, immigrants, people who already exist on the margins of society, but it doesn't have to be. Those of us in progressive spaces can traffic in this ideology too. Our images of who is a threat will be different, but when Martin Shkreli, the man who increased the cost of vital medication from about $13 U.S. to $750 U.S. was convicted and sentenced to prison, it's harder for many of us to want to object. The system we have looks a little bit more like it makes sense, but he was arrested for fraud. Not for exploiting people who need medication. And the price of many medications owned by many different companies is still a burden that too many chronically ill people can't bear. Our current carceral system may occasionally provide the illusion of justice, but it does nothing to heal the harms caused or address the root causes of those harms. In this what it offers us is a safety net, not as a protection for society but as a way to protect ourselves from having to deal with the hard questions of how to ethically engage with people who have caused real harm in our communities. But we cannot absolve ourselves of the consequences of a society that relies on prisons or of the harms they cause. Prisons serve to isolate people from their communities and their support systems. Within prisons many inmates face abuse from staff and the power disparities leave them with little recourse. People in prisons are routinely exploited, forced to pay exorbitant prices for basic necessities and the means to contact friends and family outside the prison system. [Voice-over]They're exploited through prison labor programs. In an article for The Guardian, Kevin Rashid Johnson describes his experience in prison: "Though I've always refused to engage in this modern slavery myself, I've witnessed plenty of examples of it. The most extreme were in Texas and Florida, where prisoners were forced to work in the fields for free, entirely unremunerated. Prisoners, who did not agree to such abject slavery, were put in solitary confinement." Disabled people are dramatically overrepresented in prisons. In a Human Rights Watch Interview: 'the Horror of Australia's Prisons,' researcher Kriti Sharma responds to the question, [voice-over] how is it that 50% of Australia's prison population has a disability? "18% of Australia's general population has a disability. The most common type of disabilities found in prisons are mental health conditions. People with disabilities are not more criminal than anyone else, but the lack of comprehensive mental health and social services has created a pathway to prison for many people with disabilities. Many are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Research shows that most of the offenses they committed are less serious than offenses committed by others: A failure to pay fines, traffic violations, or public order offenses." Kriti Sharma also describes the abuse that disabled prisoners face. "Under international law, solitary confinement is being locked up in a room for 22 hours or more per day without meaningful social interaction. Across the prisons I visited you see people with disabilities - particularly mental health conditions - kept in solitary for days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years. When a prisoner goes into this unit, they have no one to talk to. Lights are on 24/7, making it hard to sleep. They have no mental health support. They have to wear a suicide-proof gown, they're given finger food to eat, so no utensils. All this happens to them when they are having a crisis, when they're crying out for help. And they experience this as punishment." Prisons are not the only institutions where disabled people are abused and have our rights denied. Anti-prison activists and disabled activists are fighting many of the same battles. Disabled people can be confined in medical and psychiatric services, nursing homes and group homes without our consent far too often. Under compulsory treatment orders mentally ill people have many of our rights stripped away, can be forced to stay in a hospital or mental health clinic without our consent and have treatments or medications forced on us against our will. Mental health care is vital, but for that very reason turning it into a threat or a tool for control used without respect for the person's consent, human rights, or autonomy is reprehensible. And it erodes trust in the mental healthcare system, creating yet another barrier to accessing mental health for multiply marginalized people. In "Freedom for Some is Not Freedom for All," disability activist Alice Wong wrote: "Congregant care settings do not ensure safety or care. By design, institutions do not allow us to know the conditions of the people incarcerated inside. They're allowed to operate without transparency and accountability. They render people as less than human, subject to exploitation, abuse and neglect. The systems that exist now don't have to remain the same. We must dismantle the nursing home industry. that places profits over lives as they endanger their workers and operate with inadequate oversight and regulation. And we must work towards decarceration and deinstitutionalization, because these systems are dangerous, inhumane and unjust." Confining people in prisons and confining disabled people in so-called care institutions are painfully similar issues. They treat some people as disposable and isolate us because separating us from the rest of society seems like an easier default than providing genuine and appropriate care to everyone who needs it. We are part of societies that built these institutions or committed other wrongs and continue to oppress disabled people. We are also part of societies that said, no, we will not allow this to continue anymore. We bear responsibility for what is happening around us, but we also have the option to draw strength from the incredible activist movements that continue around us. Transformative justice is not a simple solution. It invites us to imagine a world without prisons. And from that starting point to look beyond punitive systems and create many alternatives that support and empower a wide range of different people in a wide range of different community. In transformative justice, we create space for victims to decide for themselves what they need to heal, for communities to recognize their obligations in providing support and in holding others to account. And we create opportunities for perpetrators to understand and address the harm they caused and do what they can to make things better. It's an intentionally flexible process that recognizes that what works in one situation may not/will not work in another. Transformative justice looks at the systems and communities we live in and asks: What are the conditions that allowed harm to occur? What are the conditions that would need to exist to have prevented this harm from occurring in the first place? These questions mean that transformative justice approaches are able to achieve systemic change by recognizing that while the perpetrator is absolutely responsible for what they did, the community is responsible for making longterm systemic changes and creating societies in which it's the conditions that led to this harm don't arise as often, or ideally again. It means investing our resources in education, in welfare, in healthcare, not in the exact forms they're in today, but as ways of giving everyone access to learning and knowledge, to material support, and to medical healthcare, including mental healthcare, without asking them to submit themselves to a degrading or dehumanizing system. Transformative justice can involve formal or informal mediation between people. It can mean supporting the victim to talk to the person or people who harmed them. It can mean supporting them to be in their communities or alone in their own space without having to engage with whoever harmed them, if that's the route they choose to take. It might involve the perpetrator doing very concrete work to directly repair the harm that they caused, or helping the victim directly, or doing other work to help other people. It might be that they with other people to support them and keep them accountable, learn better coping skills or work on themselves to make sure they won't repeat the harm. It might mean that they temporarily or permanently remove themselves from specific groups or community spaces that the victim is also part of. If the victim wants access to those spaces without having to interact with the perpetrator. It's a form of taking responsibility and ownership for the consequences of the harm they caused. It means recognizing that the person who caused harm often needs to heal too. And recognizing that that is not a burden or responsibility to place on the victim. Transformative justice is far from perfect. Many approaches assume that people have a community that they are connected with, or assume that the community they're connected with is in the same physical space as they are. Both of these things are not true for a lot of us. Some advocates for transformative justice lack knowledge of disability justice and the issues that disabled people face. And because of that can rely on or recommend approaches that rely on social workers or counselors or psychologists without awareness of how those systems have a lot to make up for in a history and current practice of perpetrating harm and abuse against mentally ill people. For disabled people who have been let down again and again, judged as too hard to support or alienated from communities that refuse to address their own ableism, the idea of a system that doesn't make many concrete guarantees and relies a lot on community support can quite reasonably raise a lot of skepticism. But mainstream systems keep letting us down too. They don't work. And they don't provide any image of a path towards working. In "The Prison Paradox: More Incarceration Will Not Make Us Safer," [voice-over] Don Stemen, department of criminal justice and criminology at Loyola University, Chicago wrote: "Despite two decades of declining crime rates and a decade of efforts to reduce mass incarceration, some policymakers continue to call for tougher sentences and greater use of incarceration to reduce crime. It may seem intuitive that increasing incarceration would further reduce crime, in reality, however, increasing incarceration rates has a minimal impact on reducing crime and entails significant costs. Any crime reduction benefits of incarceration are limited to property crime. Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates. Incarceration may increase crime in certain circumstances. In states with high incarceration rates and neighborhoods with concentrated incarceration, the increased use of incarceration may be associated with increased crime. Transformative justice is hard. and it is still being written. The moral arc of the universe is long but we can drag it a few degrees in the right direction. Transformative justice is an opportunity to see that while we don't have all the answers yet, we can create something much better than the systems we currently have. It's an obligation and an incredible opportunity to imagine better.