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In what is (potentially*) the start of an ongoing series, this month we’re joined by our own Rebecca Shaeffer for a discussion of what people with disabilities experience in the carceral system, how they disproportionately end up there, and what we can do to support returning citizens.
*This is contingent on us being organized enough to do that.
Full transcript available at https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-april24/
Jack Rosen:
All right. Michelle, you want to kick us off?
Michelle Bishop:
I’m sorry. Did we decide who was going to intro the topic and read the bio before we started recording? Or…
Stephanie Flynt:
No, we just clicked record.
Michelle Bishop:
Just started recording when we have no idea what we’re doing?
Stephanie Flynt:
♫ Be prepared ♫ Okay.
Michelle Bishop:
Was that The Lion King?
Stephanie Flynt:
Yes. Well, Nala’s here, I have to sing The Lion King.
Michelle Bishop:
Jack, use all of this.
♫ Intro Music Plays ♫
Michelle Bishop:
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to National Disability Radio. Woo. We don’t have a cheer sound, do we? I keep telling Jack to put a cheer sound in there, but I don’t think we have one.
Stephanie Flynt:
I think I said a cowbell.
Michelle Bishop:
Well, everything needs more cowbell.
Stephanie Flynt:
Yes.
Michelle Bishop:
But, everyone, applaud while you’re listening at home. Woo. All right. Good enough. I’m Michelle Bishop. I’m the voter access and engagement manager at NDRN and one third of your podcast hosting team.
Stephanie Flynt:
And I’m Stephanie Flynt, public policy analyst here at the National Disability Rights Network. And I am the two thirds. Can’t do fractions.
Michelle Bishop:
Look at us doing math.
Stephanie Flynt:
Yeah. I know.
Raquel Rosa:
I also don’t do math. This is Raquel Rosa. I am your community relations specialist here at NDRN, but if we’re going to do thirds, I do like pie and pizza, so we can pretend that I’m the final slice.
Michelle Bishop:
Also, it is April and none of us are doing your taxes, for a reason. We went into civil rights because math ain’t our thing.
Welcome, everyone. We have an exciting episode for you this month. Before we jump into it, do we have any news or exciting or, of course, hilarious things to talk about? And, of course, our producer should introduce himself as well.
Jack Rosen:
Oh, I don’t know, you introduced the three thirds of the podcast team.
Stephanie Flynt:
Oh, no.
Michelle Bishop:
The most bitter thing every episode.
Stephanie Flynt:
Okay, a four. Jack is now a producer host.
Michelle Bishop:
No. That’s not the vibe we discussed. This has been discussed. People all know it’s been discussed behind the scene that Jack is our Gelman. Okay. He’s our producer who’s featured on air. It’s a very specific important thing. I mean, Regis and Kathie Lee were nothing without Gelman.
Raquel Rosa:
That’s a reference for those of us who are over 40.
Michelle Bishop:
Wow. I feel personally targeted, but-
Raquel Rosa:
So, I’m right there. I’m right there.
Michelle Bishop:
Yes. So, we have a really interesting complex topic to bring to you all this month. We’re going to be looking at the intersection of the disability community and the criminal justice system. And this is a topic that it runs so deep in so much of the civil rights work we do in the disability community, and is so complex and so broad that actually if all goes well with this episode, we were thinking of turning this into a bit of a short series of episodes addressing this issue from different angles. Don’t ask us when those next episodes are coming out. We have not planned them yet.
But this month, we’re going to kick it off actually by talking to one of our own. We have for you Rebecca Shaeffer from NDRN. Rebecca joined NDRN in 2023 as a staff attorney for criminal justice and institutions. In this role, she provides technical support and training to P&As in their work monitoring, investigating and litigating rights abuses against people with disabilities involved in the criminal legal system, from police emergency response to jails, prisons, and reentry.
Prior to joining NDRN, Rebecca worked for over a decade in international human rights, where she helped to develop and implement new standards for criminal procedural rights in Europe, the US and Latin America, and supported networks of criminal defense lawyers with international and comparative legal expertise and peer learning facilitation. Raquel and Stephanie were live on the scene for this interview, so take it away ladies.
Raquel Rosa:
Today we have our very own Rebecca Shaeffer. She is the staff attorney at NDRN who focuses on criminal justice and institutions. Rebecca, thank you for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
Hi, I am so excited to be on the podcast. I’m an avid listener. I joined NDRN in July as the staff attorney for criminal justice and institutions. That means that I provide technical support and training to protection advocacy agencies for all of their work on behalf of people with disabilities who are in jail or in prison, who are in contact with police, or who are recently reentering back into society after being incarcerated.
My background is as an international human rights lawyer focusing on criminal systems and penal systems all around the world. And I’m super inspired by the work of NDRN and the protection advocacy agencies and just really excited to be part of this conversation and this work.
Stephanie Flynt:
Awesome. Thank you so, so much, Rebecca. Super helpful to have that background and super excited to have you as an avid listener of the podcast. So, you get a gold star for that one.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
I love gold stars.
Stephanie Flynt:
Yay. All the gold stars, all the awards, all the thanks. So, I guess, I would start off by asking, in your opinion, why do you think that individuals with disabilities are disproportionately incarcerated or affected by criminal systems?
Rebecca Shaeffer:
So many answers to this question. And first of all, I just want to acknowledge that people with disabilities can get into trouble with the law for the same reasons that anybody else can. And so, that happens. They’re people and sometimes they run into trouble and that’s definitely part of the story.
But you’re right that people with disabilities are disproportionately represented in prisons and jails and in criminal systems. And that’s for a lot of reasons, that really come back to our failure as a society to accommodate people in the community with disabilities and our failure to invest in collective care for people with disabilities, such that they become alienated from society. And that happens because people with disabilities, because of failure of society to accommodate them in childhood, because of abuse and neglect and exclusion from school and from activities, because of contact with institutions throughout growing up, may end up with trauma, may end up with a lack of educational and professional opportunities as they grow, or maybe attempting to self-medicate using drugs that are criminalized in our society.
So, for all those reasons, people with disabilities can end up with behaviors that are criminalized. But also, people with disabilities behavior is often misunderstood, particularly by law enforcement, as criminal when it’s not. This is particularly true for people with mental health disabilities, people with autism, developmental disabilities, intellectual disabilities, whose behavior in public sometimes attracts the attention of bystanders or of police and is misunderstood as dangerous or disruptive in some way. And they’re shuttled into the criminal justice system instead of having their needs met through health or care or other sorts of just normal cultural interactions.
We know that people with disabilities are more frequently hurt and killed by police in interactions and that they may find themselves in poverty and in homelessness and in other situations that leave them vulnerable to police intervention in ways that can be really dangerous for them.
There’s also ways that contact with police can go wrong in the course of normal traffic stops or other ways that police interact with people on the street, in public. For example, if someone’s deaf or hard of hearing, if they’re blind or low vision, or if they have mobility impairments, they may not respond to police when they’re told to stop or put their hands on the dashboard, in the same way that differently-abled people may, and that can be misunderstood by police and lead to unnecessary arrest or violence by police. So, these are the ways that people with disabilities get funneled into the criminal justice system at a disproportionate rate.
Raquel Rosa:
Thank you for shedding some light on that. Rebecca, you’ve touched on this a little bit. And in my thinking just about the breadth of the disability experience, I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about what it’s like for people with disabilities who are incarcerated. I’m sure it’s the big bite to take of the apple, but if you could just talk a little bit more about that.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
Being incarcerated is a horrible experience for pretty much everybody who goes through it. So, I want to start there, but it’s certainly not set up for people with disabilities. I mean, prisons and jails, like any other institution, have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Facilities should have an ADA coordinator, but nothing is going to away the fact that these facilities are just not set up for people with disabilities, regardless of what their disability may be. And this differs by facility and it differs between jail and prison. Prisons may be a little bit better some of the time at accommodating people, but if you can imagine, for example, being deaf, using sign language to communicate with people and having to be handcuffed every time you’re moved from one part of the facility to another. You can’t speak, you can’t communicate with people. How few people in that facility use sign language, understand your language, and how infrequently you’re provided with translation, appropriate video technology to make phone calls and communicate with, for example, medical staff.
All of these things make traversing an ordinary day incredibly perilous. And you can imagine the same thing for people who may be blind and low vision. Responding to the intense disciplinary regime on the intense demands for obedience and compliance with orders, requires an ability to understand and respond to the demands of officials quickly, or face discipline, which happens to people with disability quite a lot.
So, when their needs are not accommodated, they’re often disciplined, they’re put into solitary confinement perhaps, or they have privileges for folks. We may also find that people with disabilities don’t have access to programs inside, so they can be really isolated and not given the same access to recreation, to personal development that other people may have. And this can even mean that they end up spending more time in jail and prison than other people because they can’t, for example, get good time credits for taking programs, or demonstrate that they’re rehabilitating themselves in the same way that other people can.
So, there’s a lot of exclusion inside, a lot of isolation and alienation and a lot of punishment. So, we find that solitary confinement is used incredibly disproportionately against people with disabilities, often with mental health disabilities but not exclusively. And that has a knock-on effect of trauma and further disabling as people decompensate in an environment where they have really no stimulation, no human contact, no recreation inside.
And then, people who have difficulties with mobility just have trouble getting around these facilities. They’re not always accessible. People are not always given the medical equipment they need to get around. They may not be able to access the recreation yard. And we see this happen a lot as people age in prison and their needs change. There’s very little screening for people with disabilities, particularly for cognitive impairment, for autism, for DD and IDD. I mean, if you don’t come in with a strong sense of what your disability is and an ability to explain that to authorities, it’s unlikely that it’s going to get picked up.
And this is all happening in a background of just really poor access to medical treatment in a lot of facilities. So, if people have been on Medicaid on the outside. Inside, you don’t get Medicaid. Medicaid is cut off, social security is cut off, and your healthcare is provided by the prison or the jail. Usually, they have a contract with a private company and they’re motivated to cut costs. And in order to get access to healthcare, it’s not like there’s preventative care and you get regular well-personed visits like you would on the outside. You have to have a symptom that’s severe enough that you can convince a prison officer to get you to the medical clinic. And it can be really hard to convince workers at the prison that your medical complaint is serious and real. These are often ignored.
And then, the care that you get inside may be very, very poor. So, we see a lot of preventable illness and injury going untreated and people incurring unnecessary pain and suffering, illness, and untreated injury that happens to them because they don’t have regular and good access to healthcare. And there’s a lot of just punitive attitudes by prison and jail workers against people who are incarcerated. They’ll think that people are malingering, they say basically making up that they have health problems when they don’t.
And then, there’s also an accessibility issue here because in order to get the attention of prison officers to file a grievance or a request for medical care, usually you have to fill out a little form. And again, this is not a communication system that’s accessible to everyone. So, a lot of times people with disabilities have to rely on the kindness of another incarcerated person to help them fill out requests for medical assistance, grievances, complaints, requests for accommodations. And that can be really difficult depending on who you’re incarcerated with and what your disabilities are, what your relationships are like with people inside. So, everything just becomes much more difficult, and most people come out of prison in much worse health and with less capacity than they did going in.
Raquel Rosa:
This is incredibly sobering. And as you were speaking, I thought a lot about just the deference to people having bad motives, that in other words, people are governed to be sneaky or to do bad things. And so, therefore, the approach within the carceral system is to treat people poorly because they’re up to no good.
And then, with the added layer of disability, it just makes me think about easy scapegoat-type activities. This just sounds like a very lonely and painful experience for people. I am having a hard time just imagining what that experience is like. It is incredibly shocking and just makes me really think about the gaps that we have in our own movement to make sure that people with disabilities who are incarcerated are also part of the disability justice movement.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
Yeah. Thanks for saying that, Raquel. I think it’s really true. I mean, because of the nature of politics and the punishment ethos that’s really deep in American society, I can see where the disability justice movement hasn’t necessarily always embraced those members of our community who are in conflict with the law. I mean, it’s not a great constituency to bring to the hill. And there’s a way in which people with disabilities are sometimes seen with this sort of veneer of innocence, as good victims who need help. And we know that that’s not true and not the way that we want to be seen, not the way our movement wants to be seen, but this population of people, it’s a difficult constituency politically for our movement to embrace. But I think that we cannot participate in our collective neglect and abandonment of people with disabilities, that are the reasons why they ended up in prison in the first place.
And we also have to think about the future. What’s our vision for the freedom and liberation of people with disabilities? What do we think is happening to people in prison and what do we want for them on the other side of that? Most people are coming back to the community, and in what condition are they by the time they come out, if they come out? Because a lot of people also die inside or are further injured or disabled by their experience of incarceration.
So, I do think that we have to embrace our siblings who have experience of incarceration, to understand that jails and prisons are part of a continuum of carceral approaches to disability that includes institutionalization, that includes social erasure and exclusion from society. And to realize that jail and prison are just another way to disappear people with disabilities. And to refuse to participate in that, to continue to embrace them through the time that they’re incarcerated and all the way through their lives, requires us to confront our own stigma.
We also have to confront the ways that racism interacts with disability discrimination, and to understand that people who are, for example, Black and male and autistic, walk through this world with a different set of dangers than people who are white and autistic. And for us to really contend with those intersections, and to not leave any of us behind, because we’re not free till we’re all free.
Jack Rosen:
Rebecca, you’ve touched on a lot today, and I’m just wondering what we can do to support returning citizens with disabilities.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
I think it’s really important for people who work in this space, who work with people with disabilities to understand the ways that periods of incarceration impact the needs of people with disabilities. They are going to have disruptions to their benefit. They will have disruptions to their healthcare, and they will also have significant trauma and lack of faith in authorities. And all of these experiences make it harder to connect folks with the services they need.
So, to just be sensitive and proactive about understanding people’s histories of incarceration. You may not know that someone has been incarcerated before. You probably need to take proactive steps to reach out to places of detention, to reentry organizations to offer a disability-informed lens. I mean, ultimately, I think that neither the movement to reform our criminal legal system, our movement to liberate people from over-incarceration, and the movement for disability justice and liberty and power for people with disabilities depend on each other. And neither one of those movements is going to be successful without the other.
I see so often from my background in criminal justice reform that the kinds of reforms that are suggested often, unfortunately, are going to drive people with disabilities into institutions. Decarceration by itself is not going to solve the problem of failure to invest in community care. And at the same time, the disability justice movement can never be fully realized until we get our people free from prison.
So, I think that we need to be deeply in conversation with each other to ensure that the kinds of solutions, the kinds of policies we’re promoting are cognizant of the fact of criminalization of people with disability and the failure to provide appropriate care in the community, both driving incarceration and driving institutionalization.
And we’ve seen in the past few years, just a huge backsliding in commitment to freedom for our people. We’re seeing a return to policies that promote institutionalization, and we’re seeing a backlash to the small reforms we got following the uprising around the murder of George Floyd and the decarceration efforts that were made during COVID. Just a huge backlash and movement to both re-incarcerate and re-institutionalize our people, and a failure to invest in what we know works to keep people safe and together and in community.
So, I think that movement actors in both of these fields need to work really closely together and understand what it is people need to be safe and to be free, because ultimately, that’s a goal that we have in common, people who are working to make the criminal justice system fair and people who are working for disability justice. But the solutions don’t lie in just one of these conceptual political areas, and the solutions are what we need to focus on, because right now it seems like political actors and the press and the public seem to think the only option for meeting people’s needs is to put them somewhere, put them in a jail, put them in a hospital, put them in a group home, take them out of the community. But these are our people, this is our community, and we can only build public safety for all of our people together.
Stephanie Flynt:
Wow. Thank you so, so much, Rebecca. This has been an amazing discussion and I’m so glad that we were able to have this discussion today. I know that I found it very valuable, and I’m sure that our listeners will also find it valuable.
But I wanted to check in with you to see if you have any other final thoughts. I know that Jack made a great point about checking in to see how we can support individuals with disabilities when it comes to transitioning out of the carceral system, but I just wanted to see if you have any other final thought that you’d like our listeners to know or that you’d like us to know?
Rebecca Shaeffer:
Such a downer. I’m never the fun one at the party.
Stephanie Flynt:
You are the fun one. That’s why we have you here.
Rebecca Shaeffer:
The work that I do. I guess, what I would say is that despite the grimness of this area and the pain and the suffering that people are going through in incarceration, I have a lot of hope for this movement, particularly at the intersection of disability and criminal justice for reform and liberation movements, because I think it touches on such core values that we have as a society. Values around liberation, around belonging, and that there’s a huge amount of joy, of healing, of redemption that’s available to us if we can address the stigmas that we all have, both against people who have been in conflict with the law and people who have disabilities. And continue to work toward acceptance, belonging, and working towards solutions that really prioritize safety and health.
These are really positive values that we can promote that, I think, work politically, that work interpersonally, and that can lead to real paradigm shifts in what we consider to be public safety, because that means safety for our people.
Raquel Rosa:
Well, Rebecca, like I said earlier, you’ve given us so much food for thought, enlightenment and ways for us to just deepen our advocacy and to lean into the less obvious aspects of disability justice.
I feel like this is probably the most humbling episode that we’ve ever had, and I think I speak for all of us when I say how much we appreciate you for the work and commitment you have made to this aspect of our work. Thank you so much for being here.
Michelle Bishop:
Stephanie and Raquel, thank you so much. And of course, Rebecca as well. That was a fascinating conversation. I feel like we opened up more issues than we can possibly resolve in one episode of one little but very mighty podcast. So, I suspect you are going to hear some more episodes from us going forward, on this issue. But until then, now that she’s back in action, I suppose I have to ask, Stephanie, did you bring us a joke?
Stephanie Flynt:
Okay. Are you ready for my very much anticipated joke? Because I think it’s going to be a home run today.
Michelle Bishop:
Oh, no. Oh, that’s a clue. Okay. Yes, Stephanie.
Stephanie Flynt:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So, I do have a question. What do y’all think that brownies and baseball teams have in common?
Michelle Bishop:
Okay. Wait, wait, wait. So, brownies, the dessert, and a baseball team? Is that the question?
Stephanie Flynt:
Yes. Yes.
Michelle Bishop:
Okay. I’m thinking.
Stephanie Flynt:
What they have in common.
Raquel Rosa:
Is it batter?
Michelle Bishop:
Oh.
Stephanie Flynt:
They need to have good batters.
Michelle Bishop:
Oh, boy.
Stephanie Flynt:
This is courtesy of the Ben and Jerry’s thing in my fridge. I can’t remember what, I think that’s their chocolate fudge brownie thing. Not that this is a sponsorship, but if Ben and Jerry’s wants to sponsor my-
Michelle Bishop:
Your freezer?
Stephanie Flynt:
My freezer, that would be great.
Michelle Bishop:
Stephanie’s freezer brought to you by Ben and Jerry’s. There’s a chance we can’t use any of this, can we? Can we use this, Jack?
Stephanie Flynt:
I gave credit to Ben and Jerry’s.
Michelle Bishop:
Are we allowed to talk about them like this?
Raquel Rosa:
I think that’s another question for our general counsel.
Michelle Bishop:
All right. I’m making a list.
Jack Rosen:
I mean, my answer is, as I’ve often said on this podcast, if they sue us, it would be good publicity.
Raquel Rosa:
Then, I guess, you’re taking care of the legal fees, Jack.
Michelle Bishop:
Why are we allowed to run anything in NDRN? Is the real question.
Stephanie Flynt:
Right.
Michelle Bishop:
That said, got to admit, decent shows this month. Welcome back, Stephanie. We missed you so much.
Stephanie Flynt:
Oh, it’s great to be back. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Raquel. Thank you, Jack.
Michelle Bishop:
Jack, tell the peeps where they can follow us on social media.
Jack Rosen:
You can follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and now we’re even using Threads, so be sure to check us out. As always, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. Until next time, folks.
♫ Outro Music Plays ♫
