Foucault and #BlackDisabledLivesMatter

 Amongst many other things, and stated much more eloquently, Foucault proposes the following two ideas in his body of work:

1.  Institutionalizing the mentally ill is not social progress; it is society’s inhumane and selfish method of coping with our discomfort with mental illness. The “medicalization” of mental illness in the 1700s resulted in the birth of the mental institution, which removed mentally ill and disabled people from their homes and families, out of the view of society, and allowed them to be confined, tortured, and experimented on by the state. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault states, “Modern man no longer communicates with the madman...there is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.” Society no longer wishes to understand mental illness, or to see the mentally ill. The result of this practice is total dehumanization.
2. Prisons are less humane than public executions because they obscure the mechanisms of state control and abuse which are common to the criminal justice system. In a public execution, at least we are forced to bear witness to the violence—and at least it’s over quickly. In prison, every moment is designed to inflict pain. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault states, “But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement … There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system.”

A Foucauldian analysis of the state-sponsored executions of Ricardo Muñoz, Walter Wallace, and Osaze Osagie might argue that the only reason we are able to understand and condemn these abuses of power by the state is because they were recorded, because they happened in the middle of the street rather than behind the walls of an institution. These deaths are atrocities, and they illustrate a pattern of abuses of power by the police against disabled people of color. However, that pattern is part of a pattern of more systemic injustices, which include the mistreatment of the mentally ill and prisoners within our institutions. Disabled people are tortured and die in institutions. Prisoners are killed by law enforcement in police custody every day. We know this. The difference in this situation is that we had to see it. Is that why we condemn it?

I hope this hasn’t come across as flippant—I’m gutted and horrified. Ricardo Muñoz, Walter Wallace, and Osaze Osagie did not have to die. Police should have employed de-escalation techniques at the minimum, and non-lethal force at the most, to protect these people in crisis, as well as their communities. What bothers me is what might still have happened if they had lived. How would Walter Wallace have been treated in state custody? I cannot imagine a scenario under our current system in which he would be treated compassionately, as a complete person, with a valuable life.

Should these deaths be part of a larger cultural conversation about how we as a society would rather hide, neutralize, and mute the mentally ill, rather than seek to understand them? Or about the subtle but undeniable mechanisms of torture inherent in our criminal justice system?