(no paper is attached to this workshop)

How is the movement to close down institutions for people labeled as psychiatrically disabled related to the growth of the prison industrial complex? What can a critical disability lens add to our understanding of the reproduction of incarceration, the political economy of carceral spaces and the populations who inhabit them? In my presentation I sketched an answer to these complex questions, as well as attend to trends of trans-institutionalization of ‘surplus populations’ that lead to a cycle of incarceration and reform, especially in the US. As an activist/scholar in disability arenas, I highlighted the importance of moving beyond analogies between criminalization and pyshciatrization to discuss the intersection of these two phenomena and their relation to larger trends of neoliberalism, carceral expansion, ableism, sanism and state repression. This presentation came out of a larger research project in which I interrogated resistance to incarceration in prisons, in the form of the abolition of the prison industrial complex; and de-institutionalization - the movement to close down institutions/ hospitals for people who are labeled as developmentally, cognitively or psychiatrically disabled. In both sites my focus was on examining forms of resistance whose ideology is to abolish or close down institutions of confinement, as oppose to trying to reform them.