09/06/2026
“I want to give some examples of . . . the political economy, of not incarceration but “decarceration”. What does it look like now? In a 2015 American Foreign Service Committee, with grassroots leadership, authored a report called: The Treatment Industrial Complex. This is where we're now. We're not just in the Institutional Industrial Complex. We're not just in the Prison Industrial Complex. I think we're in the Treatment Industrial Complex. By the way, just a footnote, people want to talk in Chicago about this “Treatment not Trauma” thing, please think about the Treatment Industrial Complex, that's all I’m going to say for now. . .
"[T]he Treatment Industrial Complex shows the shift on the part of the incarceration industry into areas like mental health care, and basically what we call “Alternatives-to-Incarceration”. So, for example, GEO, which is of course the second largest private prison company in the US, created a subsidiary called GEOcare. . . which provides mental health services in prison in addition to operating states’ psychiatric hospital that has to have forensic units. And of course, the irony of a for-profit company providing mental health services to counter the disabling effects of its own prisons should not be lost to anybody.
"Here this is what I call: carceral ableism. Or in this case: carceral saneism. And saneism is the oppression that people . . . with mental health differences face, or actually, the imperative to be “sane” and the pressures and the oppression that is caused by that. That is saneism. So, carceral ableism or carceral saneism are the praxis and belief that people with disabilities need special or extra protections in ways that often expand and legitimate their further marginalization and incarceration. For example, “mental health jails”, I can't tell you how much that is pervasive right now. You know in recent meetings that I've been at with people who do national kind of organizing against new facilities you know under the banner of “No New Jails” “No New Prisons” a lot of these proposed prisons are about creating either mental health jails or jails that will help with the opioid crisis so that people can, like you know, “sleep it off” or whatever.
"So, it's this idea of right, GEOcare, it's about caring. We're getting into the “caring” thing, and it's again “care” and “profit” or both. And so, this is one example, drug courts/mental health courts, all of this is carceral ableism and carceral saneism. But I want to end by saying that it might be clear to everybody in this room that you cannot cage people and say that you “care.” But I want you to also think about, the again, the “Cr!p”, m@d, and disabled knowledge that tells us that this is also about biopsychiatry itself. This is not about just what's happening in a cage. This is about the fact that people, again it's not just about what happens behind bars, it’s that biopsychiatry is often the only form of treatment that we think of and the first course of action for people.
"So, when we say “treatment”, what do we mean? And do we not mean assimilation. I think this is a really important question and this is not just a question about what happens behind bars, and of course we have you know the example of community treatment orders, which is basically people are forced to take medication. So pharmaceuticals and so on. But I'm talking even beyond when people are not forced to take the medications, but also when we say “defund police hire social workers”, right. What does that mean? “People need more mental health care and not criminalization.” Is mental health not related to criminalization? Is it not related to surveillance? Does it not lead to further incarceration? Does it not lead people to be then incarcerated in a psychiatric unit? Is a psychiatric unit not carceral? It's not prison, that's true, but is it not carceral? And this is also really important to think about in relation to how it's related to racialization as well.
"So, in conclusion, what a “Cr!p” or “M@d of Color” critique of incarceration and abolition might give you, I'm just repeating kind of the points . . . is that it's not just about people who identify or politicize the disabled People of Color, although it's incredibly important to recognize the high numbers of people with disabilities who get sh0t by police for example, but again, it's a framework that's based on the oppression of People of Color. Particularly anti-Blackness and Indigeneity. Particularly through settler colonialism. It was built through that frame. Ableism is built on that.
"It's about centering the experiences of disablement and ableism and saneism in criminal, racial, and social justice movement. It's about understanding carceral ableism and carceral saneism. It's about understanding the disabling nature of incarceration itself and not blaming deinstitutionalization for it. It's about understanding that carcerality happens not just in prisons. And it's about understanding that disability and madness are fundamental to our understanding of incarceration and of abolition. The disability broadens our concept, our conceptualization of incarceration, and that criminalization is only one pathway leading to carcerality, and surveillance and criminalization is very tied to racialization, very tied to pathologization.
"And lastly, … we need a lot of collaboration and coalition building between disability, mad, anti-psychiatry, self-advocates, and prison and police abolitionists, and scholars on the left.”
—Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe
['Disability, Madness, Liberation: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition' session. "Socialism 2022" Conference. Chicago, Illinois]
