Disabled Black women and girls are criminalized and harmed by law enforcement

For the nearly 4 million Black women in the United States with disabilities, ableism heightens the risk and harm of involvement with the criminal legal system. Ableism is a system of oppression, like racism or sexism, that assigns value to people based on how they measure up against a socially constructed standard of how the human brain and body are “supposed” to function and how people are “supposed” to look, move, communicate, and behave. The lens of ableism perceives differences caused by various neurological and physical conditions as deficiencies from a “standard model” human being and labels people with such conditions as disabled. This includes people who communicate using ASL or assistance devices, or become noticeably overstimulated in certain spaces or situations, or must use external mobility aids such as a wheelchair. Ableist systems challenge the right of disabled people to live and participate in society. They aim to push them to the margins where they can neither be seen or heard.

For Black women and girls, disability (or the appearance of it) is more likely to be weaponized to facilitate and justify arrest, confinement, and even death.  Ableism thus functions as a critical mechanism in the criminalization of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people.

At the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, we examine the distinct, yet often invisible, causes and consequences of criminalization and confinement for Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people. For this, we require an intersectional framework that helps us understand how conditions of safety and risk are constructed by the multiplicity of Black women’s identities. Intersectionality, a term originally coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, theorizes that multiple systems of oppression (like racism, sexism, and ableism) combine and overlap to shape discrimination in ways that cannot be reduced or isolated to a single system of oppression for groups, like Black women, who hold multiple marginalized identities. An intersectional lens on criminalization and confinement demands that we critically engage with the role of ableism in the criminalization of Black women and girls, and what it means for our vision of a world where care is prioritized over punishment.

Ableism heightens the risk of contact and/or involvement with the criminal and juvenile legal systems for all people with disabilities, but has an especially pronounced impact on disabled Black women, girls, and gender expansive people. Even with limited research and available data, this impact is apparent:

• Over 70% of Black women in federal or state prisons report at least one form of disability (psychiatric and nonpsychiatric).

• By the age of 28, 41.3% of Black women with disabilities have been arrested at least once, compared to 22.4% of non-disabled Black women and 29.8% of disabled white women.

• An estimated 85% of youth in juvenile detention have disabilities that make them eligible for special education services, and approximately 39% of girls in youth detention are Black. 

These statistics suggest that not only are disabled Black women and girls overrepresented within the criminal and juvenile legal systems, but that the majority of Black women and girls who come in contact with these systems have one or more disabilities. 

This holds major implications for those working to dismantle pathways to criminalization for Black women, girls and gender expansive people. It means that we must better understand and address the mechanisms that lead disabled Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people to juvenile and criminal legal system contact and ensure that Black women and girls with disabilities are at the forefront of the movement to end criminalization. 

Parts two and three of this blog series will dig deeper into how Black disabled women and girls are criminalized through the direct punishment of disability associated behaviors and actions, as well as systems that fail to meet their complex needs.

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You can support our work by subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates about reports and resources that support system-impacted Black women and girls and by sharing this blog with your network. You can also read our report, “Punishing Black girls with disabilities”, an analysis of national school discipline data showing how Black girls with disabilities are especially impacted by exclusionary discipline.