Review: Decarcerating Disability: deinstitutionalization and prison abolition by Liat Ben-Moshe

Nelson Professor Camille is author of the ground-breaking 2011 text ‘Racializing disability, disabling race: policing race and mental status’, Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, 15 no. 1 (2010), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1750285 and is currently Dean at American University Washington College of Law.

Nelson Camille , ‘Frontlines: policing at the nexus of race and mental health’, Fordham Urban Law Journal 43, no. 3 (April 2016).

Nelson Camille , ‘Racializing disability, disabling race’, p. 6. Nelson reflects on the aim of the article: ‘Given the seeming discrepancies in my review of the available cases, the goal of this Article is to theorize the ways in which people who are thought to have diagnosable mental illnesses are triaged by police in the exercise of their discretion in a manner that either helps or harms them.’

Puar Jasbir , The Right to Maim: debility, capacity, disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Razack Sherene , Race, Space, and the Law: unmapping a white settler society (Between the Lines, 2004).

Bruce-Jones See Eddie , ‘German policing at the intersection: race, gender, migrant status and mental health’, Race & Class 56 no. 3 (2015), pp. 36–49; see also Vanessa E. Thompson, ‘Policing in Europe: disability, justice and abolitionist intersectional care’, Race & Class 62 no. 3 (2021).

Bland was found hanged in a prison cell, three days after being arrested following a traffic stop.

Nelson. ‘Frontlines’, pp. 615, 626.

Nelson, ‘Frontlines’, pp. 632–35.

Crenshaw Kimberlé laid the groundwork for the legal concept of intersectionality. See e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991).

Razack Sherene has been a leading authority on the intersection of race, mental health (including addiction), policing and colonialism in the Canadian context. See Razack, Race, Space, and the Law.

Puar Jasbir has examined race, disability and settler colonialism. See Puar, The Right to Maim.

Dean Spade’s work on the intersection of studies of carcerality, race and gender-based violence is formative here. See Spade, Normal Life: administrative violence, critical trans politics and the limits of law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).