Disability, Race, and the Carceral State

A prison abolitionist analysis of the Judge Rotenberg Center expands on Gilmore's theorizing of political incapacitation as a central goal of the carceral state. For Gilmore, the prison state (and specifically the amalgamation of capitalist interests that create the Prison Industrial Complex) emerged in 1968, so that the state could de-radicalize movements for collective liberation (such as the Black Power Movement, anti-capitalist movements, and anti-imperialism) and ultimately level counterinsurgency against them. Through Gilmore's analysis, political incapacitation manifests as the literally incapacitating leftist political movements. An abolitionist lens applied to the Judge Rotenberg Center expands on the foundations laid out by Gilmore to understand political incapacitation as not only about the state attempting to silence political movements but also about how Black and Brown disabled people become politicized. Notably, as carceral state marks Black and Brown disabled people as "dangerous," and "threatening," particularly through language of "non-compliance," the Judge Rotenberg Center's use of shocks, restraints, and aversives, becomes a targeted political attack on Black and Brown disabled people. The Judge Rotenberg Center's incapacitation of its students is therefore not simply misguided or ill-informed medical treatment: it is explicitly a critical function of the carceral state. According to the 2015-2016 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, 81.5% of the JRC students are Black or Latinx and all people of color make up 87.4% of its student population 3. 4 Expanding upon Gilmore's conceptualization of political incapacitation by politicizing the Judge Rotenberg Center as political incapacitation and locating it within the carceral state, further contextualizes the role of ableism in upholding the prison state.

In order to locate the JRC within the carceral state's political incapacitation, we must understand the role of ableism and medical institutions in carcerality. It becomes necessary to critically examine the racialized, anti-Black nature of the institutionalization of disabled people. Medical and psychiatric institutions, knowledge, and practices are in no way objective or unbiased. They must be conceived as informed and created by state violence and structures of power and marginalization, such as the carceral state, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and ableism.

In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Jonathan M. Metzl describes how in the 1960's and 1970's, psychiatric institutions shifted their conceptions of schizophrenia as "an illness that afflicted nonviolent, white, petty criminals,'' 5 to a violent, aggressive mental illness in Black men, who needed to be controlled and institutionalized. This was largely a counterinsurgency tactic to the Black Power Movement, so that the state could pathologize Black rage and resistance to a white supremacist society. 6 Metzl further explains how medical institutions' shift in understanding schizophrenia served a specific purpose for them to control and incapacitate Black men who were patients. Metzl documents the shift in schizophrenia diagnoses as it became racialized and weaponized for anti-Black carcerality. He looks at the example of the Ionia State Hospital, an asylum that was founded in 1883 under the name the Michigan Asylum for Insane Criminals. In the 1970s, more Black men from Detroit were incarcerated at Ionia. As a result, criteria for diagnosing schizophrenia changed to one where schizophrenia became seen as an illness marked by "aggression," "hostility," or "violence," and that individuals with schizophrenia needed to be controlled and incapacitated, often through incarceration. These shifts in diagnoses did not occur because any of these characteristics were innate to schizophrenia but due to the state trying to control and pathologize Black anger and resistance (such as the Black Liberation Movement in the 1960's and 1970's) to systematic oppression, as well as dominant anti-Black cultural attitudes that associated Blackness with anger and aggression. This continues to not only shape our understanding of schizophrenia but also impact which patients are diagnosed with schizophrenia and how medical institutions treat them. The history of these broad changes in schizophrenia diagnoses contextualizes the JRC's current treatment programs and methods. That is to say, the JRC's methods did not result from "scientific" reality but from the state's dominant cultural and political narratives that portray Black disabled people as "aggressive," "violent," and needing to be controlled through incarceration. 7

Historian Emily Thuma also locates incapacitation as a key site of convergence between the carceral state and medical institutions. Thuma provides historical context around the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence (CSIV), "a broad-based alliance of prisoners' rights, mental patients' rights, and feminist groups in Greater Boston that opposed the expansion and medicalization of maximum-security units for women in Massachusetts's prisons and state mental hospitals in the 1970s." 8 The CSIV's organizing highlighted the intricate connections between the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Corrections, particularly in the cases of women's prisons and asylums in Worcester and Bridgewater, Massachusetts, called Centers for Violent Women. Women held at these state institutions were often subjected to state-sanctioned behavior modification. This in turn held up what activists and scholars call the "biologization of violence." That is to say, carceral institutions justified their existence through medicalized language which claimed that the women they held in their cages were genetically prone to violence, and incarcerating them was the only solution. Thuma notes that, while records do not disclose the racial identities of these prisoners, "given the demographics of the nation's penitentiaries and longer histories of both medical experimentation on Black prisoners and the pathologization of blackness in American science and medicine (Nelson 2011; Washington 2007)." 9

The CSIV's alliance between prison abolition organizations, and disability justice organizations, such as Boston's Mental Patients' Liberation Front offered an abolitionist lens, which can similarly be applied to the Judge Rotenberg Center. 10 Although the Center for Violent Women and the Judge Rotenberg Center are separate institutions, Thuma's historical context provides an analysis of how the medicalized carceral state uses disability as a lens for political incapacitation against Black and Brown people. Whether the Centers for Violent Women were employing behavior modification inhibit prisoners' supposed "propensity for violence" or the JRC is punishing students for behaviors associated with Autism, both institutions legitimized torture of their prisoners and patients through a medical lens. To elaborate, anti-Black ableist violence in the Centers for Violent Women and the JRC becomes legible to the law when framed as a professionalized medical treatment that will eliminate what the institution deems as violent or self-injurious behavior. Both disability justice and abolitionist frameworks make the intervention of recognizing how the medicalization of anti-Black carceral violence is not a departure from the prison state. Instead the prison state justifies its violence by morphing into different forms, such as asylums and special education schools like the JRC. Consequently, political incapacitation must be conceptualized as not only the attempt to literally control and incapacitate individuals but also the medicalized carceral state creating a system that labels certain bodies (i.e. Black disabled people) as disposable, ultimately stripping them of their autonomy. The JRC's shocks and aversives have larger structural meanings of attaching value and disposability according to racial capitalism and anti-Black ableism.

Another historical context proves essential to understanding state violence against Black disabled people from carceral and medical institutions. Namely, institutional violence against disabled people of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has not ended, it has taken different forms, such as the JRC and the medicalized framework of abuse as behaviorist therapy. In "Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace,'' Disability Studies scholar Michelle Jarman examines the rhetorical relationship between lynchings and eugenicist forced sterilizations of intellectually disabled people, who were perceived as sexually dangerous. Jarman argues that, although lynchings and forced sterilizations were distinct practices with different purposes, methods, and impacts, both practices functioned as a means for the state to label Black men and disabled people as having uncontrollable sexual urges, and needing to be incapacitated either through literal death, such as lynching or through social death, like incarceration in asylums, surgical castration, and forced sterilizations. 11 Furthermore, Jarman adds that while disability and race are separate categories, the eugenicist discourse around forced sterilization was highly racialized, particularly the justification that intellectually disabled men had uncontrollable sexual urges, which needed to be incapacitated. 12 In the context of the JRC, shocks and other harmful aversives are justified as necessary against what the Center classifies as "aggressive" and "dangerous" behaviors. 13 The JRC and its larger behaviorist framework do not attempt to understand the complex reasons why students might be acting aggressively. For instance, it is extremely likely that JRC students are traumatized from being held in a coercive, controlling institution. The Center simply labels students as "aggressive," "non-compliant," and needing to change their behaviors through painful and incapacitating methods like shocks. Incapacitation emerges as the broader theme and the goal of medical institutions and the prison state. The JRC illustrates the trajectory of institutional violence and incapacitation morphing from forced sterilizations and surgical castrations to electric shocks and other aversives. While surgical castration may not be widely practiced by asylums today, the JRC continues this institutional violence through shocks and aversives serving a similar purpose to control and incapacitate its students.

Judge Rotenberg Center Testimonials: Capitalist Productivity Assigning Value to Lives

As previously stated, capitalism creates a framework for ableism by valuing productivity and disposing of disabled people who are considered "unproductive" by not being able to perform labor in order to produce a profit for the bourgeoisie. The JRC operates accordingly by using aversives and shocks so that its students can be transformed into "productive" workers under capitalism. Upon visiting the JRC's website, the main page advertises a section called "Testimonials from Students." This section displays videos from students, relating their experiences and supposed "successes" at the school, accompanied by short excerpts from the videos. Clicking on the videos redirects to the JRC's Youtube channel. The Youtube channel features an introductory video, student testimonials, parent testimonials, and segments of court hearings, where staff, clinicians, and students testify in favor of the JRC's methods. The very existence of a Youtube channel for the JRC is noteworthy. While many schools do have their own Youtube channels, it is quite unusual for a school to feature court testimony as part of its advertising. As a significant number of videos featured on the channel show court testimony, defending the JRC appears to be a central theme of the channel. Upon searching, "Judge Rotenberg Center" on Youtube, the top results consist of videos from former students, such as

Jennifer Msumba, who has spoken publicly about her traumatic experiences at the JRC, reports about the footage of Andre McCollins being shocked, and several critical commentary videos about the JRC. Consequently, the very existence of the JRC's Youtube channel seems to serve a purpose of countering the voices of former students and activists, like Andre and Cheryl McCollins and Jennifer Msumba, who have exposed the JRC's brutality. The JRC's Youtube channel would not exist if the JRC had not garnered national notoriety that the Center now needs to defend itself from in order to continue advertising and operating. This is largely due to the advocacy and sacrifices of former students and their families like Jennifer Msumba and Andre and Cheryl McCollins. Therefore, it is necessary to keep this in mind when examining the JRC's videos through an anti-capitalist lens. In all likelihood, it may not have been possible to have access to much information about the Center at all without the work of people like Jennifer Msumba, Andre and Cheryl McCollins, and other former students who have spoken out about the trauma and abuse they experienced.

Capitalist productivity does not only exist to produce a profit, it facilitates socio-cultural values around which lives are meaningful and which are not. The JRC maintains this hierarchy through its assertion that its students cannot live meaningful and valuable lives without its programming. In the aforementioned quote from executive direction Glenda P. Crookes: "Parents are so appreciative that their child is actually making something of their life," 14 she states, concluding the introductory video. The video explains the JRC's goals, accreditations, features, and treatment methods, as a means to underscore the Center's role in making positive changes in students' lives. Crookes' brief declaration encapsulates the Judge Rotenberg Center's reliance on capitalism productivity; the Center positions itself as a producer of the value of human life. From the JRC's perspective, disabled people must earn this value and humanity through institutions like the JRC training and coercing them into productivity through shocks and aversive treatments. The only way for JRC students to live meaningful lives is for them to adopt neuronormative behaviors. Much like Taylor's conceptualization that under capitalism, disabled people's lives are only seen as meaningful and valuable when they can benefit institutions and create a profit. Institutions like the JRC, that incarcerate disabled people operate as managers of productivity, whose primary goal is to render their students and patients as productive.

In a second Youtube video on the Judge Rotenberg Center's Youtube channel, a man wearing a suit sits before a microphone in a court hearing. He speaks calmly and slowly. He is testifying in favor of the JRC and their aversive practices. He describes how he has a daughter in the JRC and how their programming has helped her. The man emphasizes his adherence to capitalist and ableist ideals of normativity by asserting that he is, "not a crazy person" and that his testimony should be taken seriously because he is an accountant. 15 He claims that he can speak for his daughter. This father's testimony serves to reinforce the capitalist and ableist standards of personhood and normativity that the JRC operates on. The man claimed to be able to speak for his daughter and how the shocks and aversives have benefitted her, even though she is her own autonomous person and she is the one being subjected to shocks and aversives, not her father. The JRC's shocks and aversives are thus located as vehicles to transform disabled people into productive citizens who only deserve to have their personhood recognized and affirmed if they are compliant and do not exhibit behaviors associated with Autism or other disabilities. At the end of the video, the man exclaims that thanks to the JRC and their aversives, he "[has] a daughter who now has a life." 16 The testimony and in turn the JRC upholds a value system placed on lives that relies on proximity to capitalist productivity. Hence, an anti-capitalist analysis is crucial for discussing the JRC.

So much of the justification for the shocks centers around the JRC's claim that the shocks create "drastic improvement." The obsession with the shocks proving their effectiveness speaks to the JRC's fundamental philosophy that views its students solely as objects of intervention, rather than political subjects whose thoughts and emotions deserve to be heard and listened to. The Center is only concerned with producing tangible results, rather than actually meeting students' needs. In one interview, JRC founder Dr. Matthew Israel stands in front of several charts and graphs and states, "You just don't see this type of dramatic immediate improvement in, I think, most behavioral projects." 17 Later in the interview, the reporter meets a young girl at JRC who appears happy and relaxed until the staff person accompanying her takes out the device that activates the shock. It becomes evident that just seeing the device caused the student great distress. When confronted about this, Dr. Israel claimed, "It was good that she had that reaction because it shows it's effective." 18 This epitomizes the JRC's investment in the productivity of the shocks; students' pain and trauma caused by being shocked is not a valid enough reason to stop the shocks. In fact, students are mandated to sacrifice their well-being in order to be rendered "productive" and "normative." Even in the opposition to the JRC, much of the focus has centered around the aversive treatments not being "effective" in treating Autism. Here, the suffering and testimonies of JRC survivors like Jennifer Msumba and Andre McCollins, as well as current JRC students, is not enough to discredit the aversives. By not centering the students who have experienced aversives, we continue to view them as objects of intervention. Instead of asking whether or not the aversives are "effective" in treating Autism, we must reject aversives solely on the basis of the harm caused toAutistic people.

Many of the testimonials on the JRC's Youtube channel revolve around how the shocks and aversives have supposedly improved students' lives. What stands out about the quotes from students, parents, and staff members is an emphasis on the JRC teaching students "self-control." One quote emphasizes a student "holding down two jobs." 19 The emphasis on work and productivity becomes even more apparent as the testimonial page further links to the aforementioned introductory video, "Welcome to the Judge Rotenberg Center." The initial footage of the eleven minute video features happy-looking students going about their daily tasks. Glenda Crookes introduces the JRC and their Applied Behavior Analysis philosophy behind the GED. She explains that the Center's approach as, "Rewarding [students'] positive behaviors and maybe fining them if they're not doing the work they should be or exhibiting behaviors instead of doing their work." 20 Here, the GED and the other aversives used by the JRC are explicitly contextualized as primary modes to increase productivity. Crookes goes on to state "Most of [the students] can earn academic money, actual cash for mastering their lessons and for moving through the assignments how they're supposed to be that they can spend on online shopping, we have a contract store, they can go on field trips, home visits." 21 This model then transforms the JRC into a capitalist manager of treating their students as objects to be monitored and controlled in order to produce normative behaviors that do not disrupt productivity. Human worth becomes legible only through producing and consuming. Importantly, the behaviors that the JRC wants to eliminate do not pose any sort of safety hazard but instead are depicted as inhibiting a student's efficiency and ability to complete their work. Almost all of these include very benign behaviors and actions such as vocalizations, tic-like movements, students raising their hands too many times, students talking out of turn, refusing to take off one's jacket, "failing to maintain a neat appearance, and "slouching in one's chair." 22 Other court testimony in favor of the JRC from students centers around them stating that the JRC's shocks and aversives have helped them by making them employable, so that they now hold jobs in food service or the JRC's kitchen. In the introductory video, Glenda Crookes explains, "With many of the high-functioning students, we're focusing on marketing skills, filling out a job application, things are really going to get them employed, independent…[Student] is now employed in the Admissions & Marketing Department…when he first came here, he didn't want to be here. It took him a long time to learn the rules, to start following the rules." 23 With the focus on work and the aversives and shocks rendering students as more desirable to employers, the JRC articulates the capitalist value that Autistic and other disabled people's behaviors and existence stand in the way of work and productivity. Since capitalism requires work and productivity, this must be remedied only through ableist ideologies espoused by the JRC, that disabled people must be abused and tortured into being able to conform to productivity, instead of valuing human diversity in minds and bodies. Crookes' quote "Parents are so happy that their child is actually making something of their life" 24 underscores the capitalist value system, that productivity is paramount to one's human worth to the point where disabled people require controlling and authoritative interventions in order to meet this standard.

The JRC's shocks exist in a macro ensnared relationship between capitalism and the

shocks on both individual and societal levels. Both a historical and a contemporary framework of electro-shock torture illuminate not only the metaphorical relationship between electric-shock torture and neoliberal capitalism, but also how the concept of shocking serves as a catalyst for implementing neoliberal austerity measures. In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein traces the origin of shock torture to a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron, who served as president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. 25 In the 1950's, the CIA funded Cameron to develop research on the effects of using electric shocks on the brain for interrogation techniques. With CIA funding, Cameron performed thirty-five day long experiments on his patients at the Allan Memorial Institute hospital in Montreal, where patients were subjected to

twenty-four shocks per individual, as well as intense sensory deprivation and isolation. The purpose of these techniques was to render victims' minds a "blank slate." 26 These techniques were later used by the CIA in torturing political prisoners of US-sponsored right-wing military dictatorships in Central America. The goal of this treatment was to completely "unravel" patients' minds, effectively turning them into different individuals. Klein explains how this underlying principle of Cameron's treatment is also foundational to the implementation of neoliberal austerity measures:

Not only did Cameron play a central role in developing contemporary U.S. torture techniques, but his experiments also offer a unique insight into the underlying logic of disaster capitalism. Like the free-market economists who are convinced that only a large-scale disaster—a great unmaking—can prepare the ground for their "reforms," 27

Klein goes on to describe how shocks on a broader level, such as the US-backed military coup in Chile in 1973 or Hurricane Katrina were strategically and intentionally used to implement Milton Friedman's neoliberal economic plans (which included drastic cuts to the social safety net, privatization, removal of worker protections and living wages). In this sense, capitalism and the state rely on shocks to drastically alter their victims (whether they are JRC patients, detainees being interrogating by the CIA, New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, or Chilean civilians living under the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship) in order to foster compliance with neoliberal measures. Klein's understanding of the role of shock in capitalism provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the JRC's role and investment in upholding capitalist values, namely productivity. The shocks are administered so that students complete their work, become employable, and not exhibit non-normative behaviors. The shocks then become the literal sites and catalysts for establishing productivity among students. Productivity and normative behaviors can only occur when students are incapacitated and made compliant through shocks-not unlike macro shocks, such as coups and natural disasters.

Liberal Pity & The Charity Model of Disability

Ominous background music plays as the video zooms in on images of Autistic children walking around, playing on a slide, and simply standing and smiling. An equally ominous voiceover states, "I am Autism. I am visible in your children but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it's too late." The camera pans in on more footage of Autistic children, simply existing, participating in common everyday activities, such as playing baseball. The voiceover grimly states in a threatening tone, "I will steal your children," "I will bankrupt you." "I will destroy your marriage." "I will make it virtually impossible for your family to attend an event, a public park, without a struggle, without embarrassment." 28 The video then transitions to shots of parents hugging and playing with their children. A second voiceover states, "You think because my child lives behind a wall, that I am afraid to knock it down with my bare hands?" The video ends with a zoom onto the logo for Autism Speaks, encouraging viewers to donate money. Autism Speaks is a charity, started in 2005 by General Electric chairman, Bob Wright. This video is a 2005 advertisement for Autism Speaks, entitled "I Am Autism." The advertisement employs a lens of pity in order to elicit sympathy from viewers so that they will donate to Autism Speaks. Through the pity lens, Autistic children in the video are transformed into objects, lacking their own autonomy, solely to be consumed by the pity of the viewer. By depicting Autistic children engaging in everyday activities of their lives, and then accompanying that footage by the sinister voiceover, claiming that Autistic children are somehow "trapped behind a wall," the advertisement conveys that the very existence of Autistic children should evoke pity. Moreover, the advertisement conveys the message that autism is a burden, standing in the way white, middle-class families' ability to live "productive" lives. Above all, we must locate this type of advertising and messaging around eliciting pity for disabled people as definitive of the charity model of disability.

This essay is a critique of the liberal pity model of disability. It explores the ways in which liberal pity serves the carceral state by invisibilizing an abolitionist possibility. Through textual analysis, I draw on an abolitionist and critical legal studies framework to argue against the liberal pity rhetoric that has been applied to the Judge Rotenberg Center and its survivors. I contend that this framework relies on anti-Black carcerality to exceptionalize the JRC as an aberration, instead of a part of the prison state. I examine the ways in which the liberal pity and liberal reformist approach to the JRC de-centers survivors and depends on white voyeuristic consumption of Black disabled people's pain and trauma. The solution to the JRC will not be located within the law. As a result, movements to end institutional violence like the JRC must be situated with broader movements to abolish prisons, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism.

It does not take critical disability politics to understand that pity functions as a crucial element of how disability is portrayed. Charities employ the pity narrative by using photos of disabled people (often disabled children), such as wheelchair users, children with cleft palates, and Autistic children in the case of Autism Speaks' advertisement, to elicit pity and sympathy from viewers, who will then feel guilty to donate. Characterized by a power imbalance, where disability is always positioned as undesirable, and a problem needing to be fixed, pity serves to differentiate disabled people, who must be pitied, from the abled, who have the power to look down on disabled people with pity. This translates into what is known as the charity model of disability. Disability blogger and activist Hans Kretser defines the charity model of disability as both a means of conceptualizing disability, as well as a profitable industry. The Charity Model positions disability as a tragedy in need of a cure. "Where the Medical Model sees medical professionals as experts in disability, the Charity Model sees non-disabled people as the saviors of disability…It therefore creates a view of disabled people's lives as tragic and pitiable." 29

Pity similarly upholds the charity model of disability, which ultimately views disabled individuals as the problem that needs fixing, instead of locating the suffering that disabled people face in an ableist society that devalues certain bodies and minds as well as institutional barriers that prevent disabled people from accessing the services they need. The medical model simultaneously aims to strip disabled people of any bodily autonomy and instead asserts that medical professionals must be "experts" on disabled people's bodies, minds, and lived experiences, instead of disabled people themselves. 30 Pity then becomes a significant lens for the medical model of disability, in that it depends on relegating disability to an undesirable category that must be looked down upon by those in positions of power.

Liberal Pity As a Function of Racialized Carcerality

Importantly, pity often establishes itself as the kinder, more benevolent approach to disability that stands in direct opposition to contempt and revulsion. Pity, thus, becomes central to a liberal framework of disability that contrasts with the conservative contemptuous attitude towards disability. The key difference here being that the liberal pity framework emerges from a supposed benevolence towards disabled people, simply viewing them as objects in need of "rescuing," whose disability is unquestionably undesirable. On the other hand, conservative contempt does not try to mask its revulsion and hatred of disability. The liberal pity model and the conservative contempt model are heavily racialized. They originate from liberalism upholding white supremacy and anti-Black state violence through paternalistic attitudes towards Black communities and conservatism believing that Black people and other people of color are "biologically" inferior to white people. In "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History," disability history scholar Douglas C. Baynton details that both conservatives and liberals have used "damage imagery" to reinforce white supremacist narratives, positioning Blackness as inferior. Conservatives justified state violence and systematic oppression against Black people through a biological framework, claiming that Black people were "biologically" inferior. On the other, liberals argued that social conditions were responsible for what they perceived as Black inferiority. Liberal pity still upheld white supremacy just as much as conservative contempt because it was equally rooted in the idea that Blackness was inferior and abject:

Daryl Michael Scott argues, liberal damage imagery "reinforced the belief system that made whites feel superior in the first place." Both the "contempt and pity" of conservatives and liberals—a phrase that equally well describes historically prevalent attitudes toward disabled people-framed Americans of African descent as defective. 31

While it is necessary to not equate disability with race because they are separate categories of power and marginalization with separate (yet often heavily intersecting) histories and contexts, liberal pity and conservative contempt function similarly to maintain both white supremacy and ableism. Liberal pity and conservative contempt are therefore, not polar opposites, as they are often regarded, but rather are part of the same white supremacist capitalist state that relies on controlling and incapacitating Black disabled people. Liberal pity must be understood as holding the same responsibility for anti-Black ableist state violence as conservative contempt. In order to understand the magnitude of this, we must begin by locating the crucial role of liberal pity in upholding capitalism. Kretser explains that capitalism requires massive inequalities between the bourgeoisie and the working-class. These equalities must be maintained by the wealthy refusing to redistribute any of their wealth or shift the means of production. Charity then emerges as an important means for the bourgeoisie to refuse to redistribute or relinquish their wealth and property. The Charity Model allows for the bourgeoisie to maintain control of the distribution of wealth by choosing a select few who will be conditionally given charity, depending on whether or not they are labeled as "deserving" or "undeserving." The dichotomous categories allow for capitalism to reconstitute itself by controlling how wealth is redistributed and maintaining the control of the bourgeoisie over that redistribution. 32 Liberal pity thus upholds capitalism by creating false dichotomous categories of "deserving" and "undeserving," disability. The "undeserving" category of disability being highly racialized, marked as oppositional and "dangerous," versus the "deserving" category of disability, which is paternalistically marked as "innocent," "childlike," and deserving of pity.

The function of the liberal pity model exists to bolster the carceral state's racialized category of "undeserving" disability that is seen as "dangerous" and "inhuman." They are two parallel categories that parasitically feed off each other. One could not exist without the other. Scholar and activist Andrea J. Ritchie elaborates on how the carceral state creates and upholds the "undeserving" highly racialized category of disability in order to justify state violence against Black and Brown disabled people, particularly Black disabled women. Ritchie defines this as "racialized ableism," in which police justify murdering and incarcerating disabled Black women by characterizing them as "dangerous" and "oppositional." 33 Ritchie and Critical Race Studies founder Kimberlé Crenshaw co-authored a report documenting police violence against Black women, entitled Say Her Name. Ritchie notes that many of the police murders of Black women, involved actual or perceived mental health crises. Therefore, while there are no official statistics, it can be inferred that police responses to actual or perceived mental health crises significantly contribute to police murdering Black women and other women of color. 34 Ritchie cites the cases of Kayla Moore, Marlene Pinnock, Eleanor Bumpurs, and Deborah Danner, all disabled and neuroatypical Black women who were murdered by police due to police perception of them as "monstrous," "subhuman," and "threatening.:

As was the case for Eleanor and Deborah, these encounters often reflect police perceptions of Black women as volatile and violent, portrayed, in the words of historian Sarah Haley, as "daft," "imbecilic," "monstrous," "deranged subjects," "lacking essential traits of personhood and normative femininity," to be met with deadly force rather than compassion, no matter their condition or circumstance. 35

Here, ableism becomes a vehicle for anti-Black state violence. The carceral state and white supremacy become defining characteristics of the dichotomy between "deserving" and "undeserving" categories of disability. The category of "deserving" disability signifying white "innocent" disabled people, who must be pitied versus the racialized category of "undeserving" disability as "threatening," "oppositional," or "monstrous" Black and Brown disabled people, who must be controlled and incapacitated by the carceral state. Thus, the liberal pity model depends on the carceral state's racialized ableism. Attempts at seemingly progressive reform for disability rights often still rely on the liberal pity model, and thus uphold racialized carceral ableism. In particular, liberal pity and its categories of "deserving" versus "undeserving" become central in reformist responses to the Judge Rotenberg Center that aim to close the JRC through legislative means.

Liberal reformist responses to the JRC focus on using court hearings and legislation to close the Center or at least curtail the usage of the graduated electronic decelerator (or GED) skin shocks. These efforts have come from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, the U.S. National Council on Disability, former JRC staffers, and Massachusetts State Senator Brian Joyce. None of these individuals or organizations located the Judge Rotenberg Center within the struggle for prison abolition. Instead, there was a concerted effort to explicitly de-politicize the Judge Rotenberg Center and to de-contextualize its role in upholding the prison state. Denial of an abolitionist lens often presents itself as playing into the liberal pity dichotomy by viewing those held at the Judge Rotenberg Center as "innocent," and "undeserving," of torture as separate from those incarcerated in state or federal prisons who have been convicted of a crime. Massachusetts State Senator Brian Joyce elaborates:

If we tried to apply this brutal device to a prisoner in Guantanamo or someone in Abu Ghraib, there would be worldwide outrage," says state Senator Brian A. Joyce, whose district includes the school's Canton site. "In fact, it's against the Eighth Amendment in our country, right? Cruel and unusual punishment. But we allow it for these innocent children. It's just not right." 36

Here, the notion of innocence becomes the defining factor that, in Joyce's view, separates those incarcerated at the JRC from other incarcerated people. Innocence, in this sense, does not only signify someone who the state has not found guilty of a crime, but also signifies a level of ableist dehumanization and pity towards those incarcerated at the JRC. It is worth noting that many of those incarcerated at the Judge Rotenberg Center are adults, some as old as fifty. 37 Yet, Joyce referred to them as children. Ableism often operates through infantilizing disabled people (particularly intellectually disabled people) and viewing them as children.

Both the liberal pity model and the legal rights-based approach to the Judge Rotenberg Center's torture manifest together to de-center its survivors. A common response has been the emphasis on the lack of peer-reviewed studies proving the effectiveness of aversives in

treating Autistic patients. In December 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning letter to the JRC for not testing their shocking device, known as a graduated electronic decelerator (or GED) thoroughly enough. Similarly, in 2012 CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper aired a segment on the JRC. Upon interviewing Nathan Blenkush, the JRC's Director of Research, Cooper asked him flatly and repeatedly, "Has this [the shocks] been peer-reviewed?" 38 Later in the interview, neuroscientist and director of Yale's Child Neuroscience Laboratory Kevin Pelphrey, who studies Autism, criticized the Center on account of the absence of peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of aversives. He later argues that behavioral research shows that punishment does relatively little to affect behavior. 39 Debating the efficacy of the GED still maintains JRC survivors as objects in need of intervention, who must be "fixed." When the focus is on the question of whether or not the shocks are effective in treating students, the experiences of JRC survivors like Andre McCollins and Jennifer Msumba are de-centered. This falls into the line of requiring objective "proof" to discredit the JRC's methods. At the core of this argument is the belief that experiences of JRC survivors are not sufficient to criticize the Center's practices. They must be scientifically proven "ineffective" in settings detached from survivors. The JRC's procedures should not be condemned due to their lack of efficacy in treating Autistic students, they should be condemned because they harm, torture, and abuse disabled people. The experiences of disabled survivors must be the catalyst for criticizing the JRC.

Critical Legal Studies Response to Liberal Pity

It proves helpful to contextualize the legal reformist approach to the Judge Rotenberg

Center within the broader framework of the law relying on exceptionalism. Markedly, the law

positioned Cheryl McCollins' lawsuit against the JRC as needing to "prove" that the electric shock torture that her son Andre was subjected to was exceptionally horrific. Lawyer and critical legal scholar Dean Spade expands upon these limitations in his book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Spade's work highlights how a radical prison abolitionist politic is necessary for trans liberation through detailing the ways in which legal reforms (such as anti-discrimination laws) continue to fail transgender people, especially trans people of color, undocumented trans people, and low-income trans people. Spade's analysis of the law's emphasis on "proving" injury to marginalized people remains particularly salient in critically interrogating the underlying factor of proving exceptional harm and the courts re-playing traumatizing footage of the JRC's torture. Spade explains how the legal reform approach is mired in individualism and plaintiffs' need to "prove" the select individuals (such as landlords, bosses, individual police officers) are racist, transphobic, or ableist. The lawsuit then reduces systematic oppression down to individual bigotry, and thus obscures state violence and resolves the state of any responsibility for structural white supremacist, transphobic, capitalist, ableist violence that severely limits the life chances of marginalized people. 40 Anti-discrimination laws and their dependence of "proving" individual bigotry as an exception, rather than one facet of structural oppression and state violence, actually end up causing material harm to marginalized communities they purport to defend. Given how the Supreme Court has made it significantly more difficult to enforce discrimination laws, proving discriminatory intent is almost impossible:

Additionally, the Supreme Court has severely narrowed the enforceability of these laws over the last thirty years, making it extremely difficult to prove discrimination short of a signed letter from a boss or landlord stating, "I am taking this negative action against you because of your [insert characteristic]." 41

Although cases rely on proving discriminatory intent, it is almost impossible to do so. Spade cites that anti-discrimination laws often do not take into account the actions of correctional officers, immigration officers, welfare case managers, child welfare workers, workfare supervisors and others who often perpetuate the most harm against marginalized people and have

the significant authority over their lives. The legal system, therefore, operates by obscuring institutional and state violence and intentionally mischaracterizing systematic oppression as the result of malevolent individuals. The aforementioned example by Senator Joyce, who framed the JRC as separate from the United States carceral state reflects this problem in the legal reformist approach to the JRC. In Joyce's eyes (and the state's eyes), the JRC is entirely separate from prisons and US military occupation like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, instead of being a part of it.

Spade's problematizing of the law similarly applies to how the court system handled Cheryl McCollins' 2012 negligence lawsuit against the Judge Rotenberg Center and three of its doctors, Dr. Robert von Heyn, Dr. James Riley, and Dr. Matthew Israel (the JRC's founder). 42 In order for the court to recognize the violence perpetrated against Andre McCollins by the JRC, individuals such as doctors needed to be "proven" to have intentionally acted negligently. The manner in which the court demanded this proof was built upon the voyeuristic consumption of anti-Black ableist violence. The disturbing video footage of the JRC staff shocking Andre was

not only played in court but introduced as central evidence. 43 Introducing the video evidence requires a level of scrutinizing and examining the footage, treating it as an object to be studied and analyzed, rather than a young person's excruciating physical and emotional pain. The court's necessity to re-circulate this traumatizing footage as "proof" of the JRC's torture ultimately dehumanizes Andre, transforming him and the trauma inflicted upon him into an abject spectacle for white, abled consumption, rather than a complex, nuanced human being. The legal approach requires Black disabled suffering and trauma in order to "prove" harm and negligence.

Just as Spade lays out how the law is designed to fail marginalized people, even in anti-discrimination lawsuits, the legal reform approach against the JRC has similarly failed those incarcerated at the JRC and subjected to electric shock torture. The law's emphasis on requiring "proof of harm" proved to yet again fail people like Andre and Cheryl McCollins. In 2013, a case filed against the JRC by Massachusetts Governor's Office was thrown out by Judge Katherine Fields who stated that, "the state had failed to demonstrate that the procedure 'does not conform to the accepted standard of care for treating individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.'" 44 This emphasis on the necessity to "prove" or demonstrate the sub-par nature of electric shock treatment administered by the JRC reveals a fundamental aspect of how Lockean liberal individualism upholds the prison state and perpetuates carceral logic.

In the aforementioned essay "Legal Terrors," Colin Dayan lays out how individual personhood is one of the bases for liberalism, and thus the carceral state can deny personhood. Locke defined personhood as dependent on a mind "capable of both memory and intention." 45 However, when it comes to courts holding carceral institutions accountable for torture (such as electric shocks) or other human rights violations against incarcerated people, there then emerges a need to explicitly prove the wantonness or malicious intent of prison officials, military personnel, or doctors overseeing medical institutions like the JRC. Dayan argues that the law and state actors (such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) use the language of proving the wantonness or intentions of prison and military officials both at prisons in the continental United States and sites like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, in order to effectively argue for a different, lesser humanity of incarcerated or enslaved people. Dayan further locates this dehumanization as a continuing trajectory from chattel slavery, so as those people that the law relegates as enslaved, terrorists, prisoners, or prisoners of war are then denied personhood through a liberal Lockean lens. "These entities exist outside the legal definition of persons. No longer the subject of legal rights and duties, these nondescripts are not even recognized as having the self-accountability so necessary to Locke's criterion of personhood," 46 Dayan explains. The law constitutes itself as the ultimate arbiter and determinant of humanity. Under the liberal Lockean model, humanity depends on designations from the state and racial capitalism, such as enslavement, incarceration, or being confined to a residential facility like the JRC.

Dayan's analysis of the law's response to torture and other grave human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and prisons across the United States correspondingly applies to liberal reformist responses to the Judge Rotenberg Center, where the legibility of the case requires the plaintiff to demonstrate intentional harm and negligence. The liberal reformist lens upholds the carceral state's goal to position the JRC, prisons or military officials, as only accountable if their intent can be proven, which in turn relies on positioning disabled JRC students (particularly Black and Brown disabled students) as outside of the legal, Lockean definitions of persons, and thus not deserving of legal protections against abuse and torture. Dehumanization and maintaining state violence is embedded within the law. Therefore, expecting the law to protect marginalized communities from torture or abuse can never be truly liberatory, because the law remains fundamentally rooted in the same anti-Black, imperialist, and ableist notions of personhood that fuel torture and incarceration, whether at the JRC, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or any carceral site.

Ultimately, the liberal pity approach to disability is woven into both cultural narratives of disability, as well as the legal reformist approaches to disability rights. Liberal pity is one iteration through which ableism preserves white supremacy and the carceral state by establishing white disabled people as angels or infantilized objects in order to create a racialized category of disability that the carceral state sees as "oppositional" or "monstrous." The legal rights-based approach to the Judge Rotenberg Center is heavily immersed into the liberal pity model, so that it feeds off objectifying Black disabled JRC survivors like Andre McCollins and re-circulating their pain and trauma for the consumption of white abled judges and court officials. A critical abolitionist politic interrupts this white supremacist ableist consumption and declares that survivors and their families like Andre and Cheryl McCollins deserve better. Campaigns to close the Judge Rotenberg Center must be situated within a larger movement to dismantle the white supremacist ableist capitalist carceral state. This similarly means expanding our understanding of the prison state. A critical abolitionist analysis of the JRC allows us to understand the prison state as not only encompassing federal or state prisons but as extrapolating to medical and psychiatric sites like the JRC. With this broader understanding of the prison state, we can move more towards viewing carcerality as a potent lens for which structures such as capitalism, white supremacy, and ableism designate people's humanity and dictate human value. Prison abolition provides us with an invaluable opportunity to build a world where no one is disposable.