Orange is the New Asylum: Incarceration of Individuals with Disabilities
Behavior analysts must audit school and court contingencies to keep disabled people out of jail.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors read every paper they could find on disabled people in jail. They wrote a story-style review to show how kids with autism or ID land behind bars.
No new data were collected; the team stitched old facts into a map of the school-to-prison pipeline.
What they found
Disabled people are still locked up far more than others. The same racist and ableist rules that push kids out of school push them into cells.
The review says behavior analysts must look at the whole system, not just one child’s behavior.
How this fits with other research
Sevon (2022) zooms in on anti-Black racism in school discipline; Crowe widens the lens to show that racism plus disableism feeds the same pipeline.
Kittler et al. (2004) counted intellectually disabled offenders and saw half commit new crimes within ten months; Crowe uses that grim number to argue the system itself needs ABA, not the prisoners.
Turnbull et al. (2017) hands us a 12-step policy checklist; Crowe tells us to run that checklist on courts, cops, and schools.
Why it matters
You can treat a kid’s self-injury perfectly, but if the school’s discipline policy is racist, the kid can still end up in juvenile hall. Start doing a contextual assessment of the rules that push disabled students out. Ask your team: which school behavior earns a cop call instead of a behavior plan? Change those contingencies first.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with disabilities and/or mental health concerns were historically removed from society and placed in institutions and asylums. Advocacy groups, drawing on civil rights movements, protested and lobbied for deinstitutionalization and increased inclusion of disabled individuals in schools and communities (Chapman et al., 2014). Although disabled individuals have more rights and access than ever before, they are still segregated in schools, encounter the judicial system more often, and are murdered by police (Reingle Gonzalez et al. in Journal of Disability Policy Studies 27:106-115, 2016). We examine the history and ongoing incarceration of individuals with differences in the United States by analyzing contextual variables, as well as systemic inequities, including the school-to-prison pipeline, access to services, and prison infrastructure. We offer resources and actionable ways for behavior analysts to begin antiracist and anti-disableist work, apply principles of behavior analysis to address personal and systemic racism, and engage in advocacy toward a more just and equitable future for all.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2021 · doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00533-9