ABSTRACT
This chapter considers options for contesting criminalised disabled people’s carceral control and debilitation through law. It proposes we should focus on transformative strategies directed towards dismantling the institutional archipelago (including prison) and supporting criminalised disabled people’s individual and collective self-determination and flourishing, rather than channel energy into tinkering, expanding and fine-tuning court diversion schemes. It is vital to challenge associations in law between disability, carcerality and legality, and resist medicalised, or even more politicised, articulations of ‘pure’ disability that enable bifurcation and differential oppression of disabled populations in ways that enable restricted access to liberty, resources and citizenship and ultimately debilitation specifically of criminalised disabled people. Transformative strategies must contest rather than reinforce interlocking forces and dynamics of oppression such as settler colonialism, imperialism, ableism and racism and could build alliances with other anti-oppression movements to jointly counter the structural conditions in which criminalised disabled people are situated. Specific strategies proposed include community led support and accountability systems, redressing violence and harm, critical disability approaches to legal pedagogy, creative engagement with law reform, strategic engagement with human rights, and jurisprudences of disability tracing endurance and evolution in law of degeneracy and the disability institution.
