Russell

"Rates of learning disability are spectacularly high among prisoners; in studies conducted among incarcerated juveniles, learning disabilities have been estimated to occur in up to 55 percent of youth nationwide; in one single-state study, 70 percent of youth qualified for special education. As for mental disabilities, in California anywhere from one-sixth to one-fourth of prisoners are believed to have diagnosable “serious mental disorders.” Most stunning of all is a four-state study which examined juveniles imprisoned for capital offenses; virtually 100 percent of those studied were multiply disabled (neurological impairment, psychiatric illness, cognitive deficits), having suffered serious central nervous system injuries resulting from extreme physical and sexual abuse since early childhood.1"

"People with so-called mental illnesses are generally deemed to have little or no production value. Their unemployment rate is the highest among the disabled population at 80 percent, and disproportionately high within the incarcerated population. Perhaps the term “social junk,” as coined by criminologist Steven Spitzer, best describes how society views this cast-off segment of the population. People labeled “mentally ill” experience harsh discrimination in many arenas, among them housing, employment, and health insurance. Increasingly they have become a part of what Christian Parenti calls “a growing stratum of surplus people’ [who, because they are not] being efficiently used by the economy must instead be controlled and contained and, in a very limited way, rendered economically useful as raw material for a growing corrections complex.” Thus the old “snake pit” mental institution is being replaced with yet another institution, the prison, where incarcerated “social wreckage” contributes to the GDP by supporting thousands of persons associated with expanding and maintaining the prison industry".

"...commercial enterprises are staffed by a hierarchy of professionals who depend upon the class of disabled persons to survive. Oliver writes:

The production of the category of disability is no different from the production of motor cars or hamburgers. Each has an industry, whether it be the car, fast food, or human service industry. Each industry has a workforce which has a vested interest in producing their product in particular ways and in exerting as much control over the process of production as possible.12

This observation is critical to disabled people’s liberation and will be revisited later. Who controls the services, what those services are and where they are rendered are major issues in disabled people’s struggle for self-determination, a struggle which has become increasingly formidable as government and corporations dismantle the social contract.''

"We must create a social order based on equality, an order that does not punish those who cannot work, that does not make “work” the defining measure of our worth, and that offers counter values to the prevailing productionism which only oppresses us all".

       Jean Stewart and Marta Russell