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Behavior and Control: Disability and Incarceration
People who didn’t fit into “normal” society were segregated into institutions on islands around New York City, alongside prisons and juvenile reform centers. In the late 19th century, these institutions became incorporated as nonprofit organizations overseen by the New York State Charities Board. Residents were all called “inmates,” classed together by their disabilities or level of “delinquency,” and usually further segregated by gender.
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While the people inside these institutions were diverse in every way, their lives were similar in that they had very little self-determination. The people running the facilities had control of residents’ lives. Many people with “invisible” disabilities like intellectual or mental health disabilities ended up in prisons and juvenile reform centers.
In the early 1900s, in part because of the development of new intelligence tests, many social reformers thought they could scientifically determine who was disabled. Sometimes they focused on helping people once they labeled them disabled; other times they were most interested in separating Disabled people from the “normal” population. Their discussions of disability mixed together many factors - intellectual ability, behavior or “delinquency,” poverty, culture, and gender and sexual norms. People who were outside of normal in one or more of these ways could find themselves labeled disabled.
In the New York City public school system, “600 Schools” were created in 1947 as a way to separate children with emotional disabilities from other students. Officials argued that these schools were needed to make sure other students’ education wouldn’t be disrupted, and said these schools would help rehabilitate students they thought of as problems. The “600” schools included day schools, residential schools, and programs within institutions, including at the jail on Rikers Island. Students at the “600” schools were overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican. Rev. Milton Galamison organized a boycott to protest this segregation in 1965.
New York schools continued to disproportionately punish Black and Puerto Rican children through suspensions in the late 1900s and to the present. Today, Black boys with disability labels are much more likely than their peers to be suspended from school.1 Suspensions from school are part of policing, and school suspensions make later involvement with the criminal legal system more likely.2
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Cheri Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City: Understanding the Landscape” (Research Alliance for NYC Schools at NYU Steinhardt, 2019), https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/research-alliance/research/publications/special-education-new-york-city. ↩︎
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Navena F. Chaitoo, “Unlocking Potential: The School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students with Disabilities” (Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2023), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6261&context=gc_etds. ↩︎
