it’s wonderful that police & prison abolition are becoming serious topics of conversation in places & among people where they maybe hadn’t been until recently, especially given that a lot of emancipatory politics / praxis is imagination work–it’s necessary to have these conversations in line with those who have been doing this work for years & for decades, and to try to bring people in while remaining wary of people who would try to water down these ideas and reroute them into liberal reformism. it’s necessary to understand the connexions between the police, the military, and all forms of forced institutionalisation including immigration / ICE, prisons, and psychiatry. to that end I want to just briefly point to something–though I don’t mean to position myself as an authority on the matter by any means–but some of the ways that people are talking about funding “mental health services” in the wake of defunding the police, talking about how we’ll get people who are “behaving erratically” to “someplace safe” in communities without police, &c.–some of this phrasing is making me a little twitchy, lmao. we need to engage with work that talks about what psychiatry IS before we can posit “replacements” for it, & it makes me nervous that some of these proposals use the rhetoric of psychiatry without seeming to examine it much
psychiatry in its current form as a web of institutions that operates through / for the benefit of race and capital needs to be seriously grappled with if we’re to advance an answer as to what an abolitionist response to psychological / behavioural difference looks like. if we think of “mental illness” as a “real,” “natural,” “neutral” or prediscusive thing such that the only problem (if we even see one) is that too MANY or the WRONG people are getting caught in the net of its institutions (for example I saw someone describe forced institutionalisation as “misuse of mental health resources”)—then we’re not thinking it through adequately. I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of the work of unlearning & reimagining (necessarily occurring in conjunction with work on the ground) that ALL prison abolition does, but I think the naturalisation of mental illness might make this one a particularly hard leap for some people–challenges to the supposedly biological nature of mental illness met with a lot of pushback when some of us started a conversation about it On Here 3-4 years ago, including/especially from mentally ill people.
to that end, some readings connecting psychiatry to race & capital, and connecting prison abolition to deinstitutionalization:
Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal
Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (2010, on libgen) talks about “how race gets written into the definition of mental illness"
An interview with Jonathan Metzl on the book
Liat Ben-Moshe, Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison Activism in the U.S. (2011, dissertation)
– “Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition” (2014)
–, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014, also on libgen)
– “Why prisons are not ‘The New Asylums’” (2017)
–, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020)
Emily Thuma, “Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s” on how the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence “forged an understanding of institutional violence that linked the politics of mental health to the repressive punishment of women prisoners’ agency, and the expansion of medicalized incarceration to hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality”
“Kamilah Brock: Woman held in mental health facility because police didn’t believe BMW was hers”
also check out this prison abolition syllabus, notably the “Carceral Intersections” section
see /tagged/psychiatry for more of what is meant in talking about mental illness (both specific categorises / diagnoses thereof, and the concept of “mental illness” in the first place) as something that is constructed by race & capital
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