Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
4-2020
Keywords
Solitary confinement, Institutionalisation, Disability Law, solitary confinement litigation, social-structural oppression
Abstract
The title of this chapter signifies at least three things. The first is the disabling effects of solitary confinement. The second is recent efforts of prison justice advocates in Canada to use law, or specifically litigation, to disable the logic of solitary confinement: to disrupt that logic through the logic of human rights. The third, most oblique reference, and one I develop here, speaks to dangers presented by the path Canada’s solitary confinement litigation has taken: a path of isolating disability-based prison justice claims from the wider ambitions of intersectional substantive equality. My thesis is that this isolation of disability (specifically, mental disorder/disability) as the organising principle of solitary confinement’s legally-cognisable harms has paradoxically re-inscribed and reinforced disability injustice, and with it, an array of interactive forms of social–structural oppression.
Recommended Citation
Sheila Wildeman, "Disabling Solitary: An Anti-Carceral Critique of Canada's Solitary Confinement Litigation" in Claire Spivakovsky, Linda Steele and Penelope Weller, eds, The Legacies of Institutionalisation: Disability, Law and Policy in the ‘Deinstitutionalised’ Community (Oxford: Hart, 2020).
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Disability Law Commons, Litigation Commons
Comments
[Pre-publication version of chapter for The Legacies of Institutionalisation: Disability, Law and Policy in the ‘Deinstitutionalised’ Community, Claire Spivakovsky, Linda Steele and Penelope Weller, eds (Oxford: Hart, 2020). Online version updated Apr 27, 2020, with further update and correction to footnotes 35 & 37 on Jan 1, 2022]