Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists who explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system.

The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, Disability Injustice examines disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement.

This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can and should challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.

Kelly Fritsch is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She is the co-author, with Anne McGuire, of We Move Together, a children’s book about disability justice. Jeffrey Monaghan is an associate professor in the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University. He is the co-author, with Andrew Crosby, of Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security States and currently serves on the editorial board of the multidisciplinary journal Criminological Encounters. Emily van der Meulen is a professor in the Department of Criminology at Ryerson University. She is a co-editor of several books, including Red Light Labour: Sex Work Regulation, Agency, and Resistance, with Elya M. Durisin and Chris Bruckert.

Contributors: Liat Ben-Moshe, Emmanuelle Bernheim, Michelle Bertrand, Lindsay Blewett, Abigail Curlew, Vèronique Fortin, Kelly Fritsch, Stèphanie Houde, Richard Jochelson, Lisandre Labrecque-Lebeau, Sue-Ann MacDonald, Ravi Malhotra, Alexander McClelland, Jeffrey Monaghan, Alok Mukherjee, Guillaume Ouellet, Pierre Pariseau-Legault, Theresa Raymond, River Rossi, Megan A. Rusciano, and Emily van der Meulen.

Disability Injustice is an important and long-overdue book on the complex relationship between disability and carceral systems in Canada. The history of policing and punishing disabled bodies and minds is pervasive and disturbing, and this work provides important insights into the theory, practice, and persistence of ableism the justice system.

Chris Chapman, co-editor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada:

This book brings together interdisciplinary and diverse work from across Canada – from jury selection and everyday surveillance to the policing of the sexuality of people with disabilities outside of the legal system. It is a fantastic accomplishment!