RESOURCES
Disabled/Mad
Abolition Dreams:
TransformHarm.org is a resource hub about ending violence. It has 6 focus areas including Abolition, transformative justice, community accountability and more. Created by Mariame Kaba, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula and more.
Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) are a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources (sometimes referred to as ‘mad mapping’).
Project LETS builds peer support collectives, leads political education, develops new knowledge and language around mental distress, and creates innovative, peer-led, alternatives to current mental health system.
Sick of It! is a (pen pal and zine) project to amplify the voices of incarcerated disabled people, and provide education about the ways disabled liberation and a world free of cages are intertwined.
The Disability Visibility Project
Mad Queer Organizing Strategies- Elliott Fukui's workshop offerings, reflections and more.
The series “No Body Is Disposable” produced by the Barnard Center for Research on Women in collaboration with Sins Invalid. These videos were made by Dean Spade and Hope Dector.
- Video series by BCRW Activist Fellow Reina Gossett, featuring conversations about prison abolition and trans liberation
- Intersections of Disability Justice and Transformative Justice
DREAMING FREEDOM PRACTICING ABOLITION - Stephen Wilson’s blog and inside study groups, in collaboration with True Leap Press
Rustbelt Abolition Radio is an abolitionist media and movement-building project based in Detroit, MI.
Disability/Madness and Policing/Incarceration
Disability and Incarceration on Facebook
Alternatives to Policing Based in Disability Justice
we believe it is necessary to also fight the ableist and sanist roots of strategies that rely on forced medication, institutionalization, surveillance and monitoring.
Alternatives To Calling Police During Mental Health Crises is a community-based movement to train in de-escalation techniques and protect mentally ill community members from police violence and the criminal justice system.
#AcceptUs #NotKillUs is a zine that traces the history of police violence on people with disabilities and community resistance in Chicago between 2012 and 2018. Written by Euree Kim and Timotheus Gordon Jr.
Disablement, Prison, and Historical Segregation - The 2001 pioneering article by Jean Stewart and Marta Russell
Everyday Abolition’s interview with Leroy Moore
Invisible No More - book, discussion guide and database by Andrea Ritchie, showing how Black Indigenous women and gender non conforming people of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement
Mental Illness is Not a Capital Crime: On the Disproportionate Impact of Police Violence on Women of Color (Andrea Ritchie)
Where Is Hope - The Art of Murder, Police Brutality Against People With Disabilities - Documentary chronicles disabled victims murdered by police as well as the activists/artists who are fighting to end police brutality against people with disabilities. By Emmitt H Thrower and Leroy Moore (Krip Hop Nation)
We Can’t Breathe: The Deaf & Disabled Margin of Police Brutality Project (includes video and toolkit). Created by Keri Gray and Dustin Gibson.
Disability Justice and Abolition- "identified some of the ways disabled people are affected by the carceral systems, not just in jail but other manifestations of the carceral state like doctors, social workers, and other individuals and institutions." By Katie Tastrom, National Lawyers Guild
Of Unsound Mind - a project exploring psychiatric power's connections with police power, including a timeline of psychiatry and mental health in the United States spanning from the Colonial era up until now
Decarceration and
Prisoner Support:
#COVID19DecarcerateSyllabus, Curated by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP)
The National Bail Fund Network is made up of over sixty community bail and bond funds across the country that are freeing people by paying bail/bond and are also fighting to abolish the money bail system and pretrial detention.
California Coalition for Women Prisoners is a grassroots social justice organization, with members inside and outside prison, that challenges the institutional violence imposed on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison industrial complex (PIC). (including an archive of Fire Inside)
Legal and advocacy:
If your disability rights are violated while institutionalized/incarcerated and you want to seek legal action, you might want to contact:
HEARD - HEARD’s mission is to promote equal access to the justice and legal system for deaf defendants, detainees, prisoners, and returned citizens.
Protection and Advocacy Systems (P&As) are dedicated to the ongoing fight for the personal and civil rights of individuals with disabilities (including those incarcerated in prisons, institutions and nursing homes). P&As work at the state level to protect individuals with disabilities. There are 57 P&As in the United States and its territories.
Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law - fighting discrimination against, and segregation of, people with mental disabilities. The Bazelon Center accomplishes its goals through a unique combination of litigation, public policy advocacy, coalition building and leadership, public education, media outreach and technical assistance.
Brief by the ACLU: LEGAL RIGHTS OF DISABLED PRISONERS
AMPLIFYING VOICES OF INMATES WITH DISABILITIES (AVID) Project of Disability Rights Washington
Disability Justice:
Harriet Tubman Collective - “A Collective of Black Deaf & Black Disabled organizers, community builders, activists, dreamers, lovers striving for radical inclusion and collective liberation.”
Sins Invalid - Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists.
- “Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People, a Disability Justice Primer” available for purchase here.
- Principles of Disability Justice
Mia Mingus’s blog about such topics as Disability Justice, Medical Industrial Complex and Transformative Justice
Lydia X. Z. Brown - LABORING FOR DISABILITY JUSTICE & LIBERATION including info on the campaign to close the JRC and the Autistic People of Color Fund
TL Lewis’s website and blog - TL’s advocacy primarily focuses on anti-violence, decarceration & prison abolition.
HEARD has developed a database of webinars about disability justice, policing, prisons & more, with access information
Work by Stacey Park Milbern- #StaceyTaughtUs Syllabus, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Alice Wong
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s website: Leah is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent
History of Deinstitutionalization:
Parallels in Time: A History of Developmental Disabilities - From the Ancient Era, through the era of institutionalization, to independent living and roots of self advocacy.
UC Berkeley's oral history archive of the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement from the 1960s to the present. See especially institutionalization and self-advocacy.
From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (2018), by Anne Parsons
Eugenics Archives (Canada) reflects the collaboration of scholars, survivors, students, and community partners in challenging eugenics. Entry on Deinstitutionalization.
Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance aims to promote an understanding of the struggle for dignity and full civil rights for persons with disabilities, using the little-known history at Pennhurst. Includes an incredible timeline of Pennhurst and a comprehensive list of disability history resources.
The book Decarcerating Disability mentions several important exposés, including (warning- these are incredibly disturbing to watch and read, mentions of violence, abuse, death, institutionalization):
CHRISTMAS IN PURGATORY - A Photographic Essay on Mental Retardation (1974) Burton Blatt and Fred Kaplan
“Suffer The Little Children” 1968 NBC10 exposé on Pennhurst State School by Bill Baldini
Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace - Geraldo Rivera's 1972 exposé of Willowbrook State School
Deinstitutionalization:
National Council On Disability’s Deinstitutionalization Toolkit: NCD’s Deinstitutionalization Toolkit is designed to provide information, strategies, state data, and case studies that can facilitate institutional closure and build community capacity to serve more people with intellectual disabilities and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) in the community.
Center on Human Policy- CHP was founded in 1971 by Burton Blatt in response to widespread abuse of and discrimination against people with disabilities. Over the decades, the Center has engaged in evolving policy, research, and advocacy in, aligned with, and often leading, the national movement to ensure the rights of people with disabilities. Archive and Resources (1979); The Community Imperative
Organizations and Networks:
Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE) - the United State’s national self-advocacy organization. Current Goal: Eliminate institutions; support affordable and accessible housing for all people in the community; National healthcare for all people; Equal employment opportunities for equal pay for all people, among others.
The Icarus Project - The Icarus Project was a support network and education project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness.
Recently transformed into Fireweed Collective- "Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice lens."
Critical Resistance - Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.
INCITE! is a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities.
Interrupting Criminalization- Hub of tools and resources. An initiative led by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie. Aims to interrupt and end the growing criminalization and incarceration of women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people of color.
The Hearing Voices Network (HVN) USA is one of over 20 nationally-based networks around the world , incorporating a belief that there are many ways to understand the experience of hearing voices and other unusual or extreme experiences.
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism.
BEAM- Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective's mission is to remove the barriers that Black people experience getting access to or staying connected with emotional health care and healing, through education, training, advocacy and the creative arts.
MindFreedom International: "MindFreedom leads a nonviolent revolution of freedom, equality, truth and human rights that unites people affected by the mental health system with movements for justice everywhere.”
Surviving Race Intersection on Injustice, Disability and Human Race- Youtube; Facebook;
National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network- including Statement of Community Care
The Care plan - providing comprehensive care navigation services to individuals and families, esp. LGBTQ+ communities. We also promote wellness at work and inclusive, ethical business practices by offering trauma-informed facilitation, training