The United States houses only five percent of the world’s population but over 20% of its prison population. There has been a dramatic increase in carceral numbers over the last several decades with much of this population being people with mental illness designations. Many scholars attribute this phenomenon to the process of deinstitutionalization, in which mental health institutions in the U.S. were shut down in the 1950s and ‘60s. However, disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe argues that this is a dangerous oversimplification that fails to credit the deinstitutionalization movement as an abolitionist movement and to take into account shifting demographics between institutions and prisons/jails. This study considers how mass incarceration in the U.S. stems from a trend of isolating and punishing BIPOC and people with disabilities at disproportionate rates as it explores lived experiences at the intersection of mental health and incarceration. Findings inform an abolitionist agenda by highlighting the near impossibility of rehabilitation and treatment in an inherently traumatizing space.

The thesis represented here was for my Honors undergraduate thesis project, which explored the social stigma of disability and its representational differences between congenital and acquired disability within the user comments in an online forum of discussion. Existing literature on Critical Disability Studies and Rehabilitative Psychology has noted the nature of disability stigma and lack of accurate representation in social settings as well as the ramifications that follow. (Mis)representations of disability can result in bias, inaccessibility, and other social ramifications such as microaggressions because of the long history of oppression and stigmatization that disabled individuals have experienced (Keller & Galgay, 2010). Data was collected from two online forums addressing disability stigma and analyzed using both deductive coding and inductive emergent analysis of recurrent themes, experiences, or ideas that were expressed in user comments. Analysis of user comments helped address the goal of this research which aimed to explore stigma, identity, and disability within a representational context. This thesis, then, wanted to better understand disability stigma by analyzing the representational differences (if any) of congenital and acquired disabled user’s comments.

The United States houses only five percent of the world’s population but over 20% of its prison population. There has been a dramatic increase in carceral numbers over the last several decades with much of this population being people with mental illness designations. Many scholars attribute this phenomenon to the process of deinstitutionalization, in which mental health institutions in the U.S. were shut down in the 1950s and ‘60s. However, disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe argues that this is a dangerous oversimplification that fails to credit the deinstitutionalization movement as an abolitionist movement and to take into account shifting demographics between institutions and prisons/jails. This study considers how mass incarceration in the U.S. stems from a trend of isolating and punishing BIPOC and people with disabilities at disproportionate rates as it explores lived experiences at the intersection of mental health and incarceration. Findings inform an abolitionist agenda by highlighting the near impossibility of rehabilitation and treatment in an inherently traumatizing space.