ABSTRACT
Legal doctrine and legal process are complicit, through court diversion, in debilitating disabled people in the criminal justice system. Court diversion enables disabled people in the criminal justice system who might otherwise not be sentenced, or even convicted, to be subjected to coercive intervention through disability and mental health services. In doing so, court diversion provides legal pathways between otherwise disparate legal domains, spaces and modes of control, and both sustains and serves to legitimise lifelong violence and precarity experienced by disabled people in the criminal justice system. Yet the language and logic of ‘diversion’ simultaneously serves to mask the complicity of legal doctrine and legal process in debilitation, as well as portraying it instead as facilitating therapeutic and supportive interventions that are necessary, non-violent, non-colonial and just. This chapter introduces the conventional approach to court diversion based in the overrepresentation of people with disability in the criminal justice system, and then moves to situate court diversion within broader issues of injustice associated with criminal justice and disability and mental health systems. The chapter then elaborates on the book’s argument by reference to key aspects of the interdisciplinary analytical frame grounded in biopolitics which is used to critically reassess court diversion, drawing on theoretical ideas pertaining to disability, carcerality and legality.
