Truthout: Reviving the Asylum Is Not the Answer to Gun Violence

It is this oppression of psychiatrized people that undergirds the current call for their incarceration in asylums. In this era of law-and-order politics, custodial mental institutions are viewed as legitimate and appropriate rather than as a form of state-sponsored violence.

This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration"Toward the end of the 20th century, the rise of neoliberalism and fiscal conservativism combined to make living in the community difficult for anyone seeking affordable and accessible housing, especially those individuals who were poor, unemployed, underemployed and/or people of color. Unjust socioeconomic policies resulted in widespread housing insecurity and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration and violence. Often, much of the blame for these consequences of socioeconomic policies is placed on deinstitutionalization and psychiatrized people. But describing deinstitutionalization as a complete failure ignores a whole generation of activism by institutionalized and psychiatrized people who fought for and won their freedom to live in the community, only to be called again into a life of segregation and ill-treatment."

Read the op-ed by Anne Parsons, Michael Rembis, and Liat Ben-Moshe, author of Decarcerating Disabilityat Truthout.