State engagement isn’t superficial reform, but can radically subvert violent ableist logics. Epistemic shifts alone are insufficient.

Moshe and Linda Steele,” feminists@law, Vol 12, No 1 (2023), dml)

In closing, I turn to the remedial pathways contemplated by the authors. Both books are written from a place of hope – the hope that the carceral logics shoring up capitalist, colonialist and ableist power may be radically subverted, not just superficially reformed or diverted. Yet rather than giving readers (including lawyers) specific instructions, the authors offer general observations aimed at generating new ways of thinking, working and being together.

Decarcerating Disability positions law as a site of contradiction and unpredictability – its meaning and effects contingent on ever-shifting factors defying the calculus of strategists. Acknowledging that no litigation win has been a straightforward success, Ben-Moshe asks: what counts as success? (DD 241). Her response is squarely in the anti-carceral tradition. First, closing institutions is insufficient. What is required is “an epistemic shift . . . breaking down the rationality and legitimacy of confinement as a practice” (DD 236). This is developed through her idea of dis-epistemologies – the deconstruction and reassembly of ideas already in play (including legal precedents) in an environment never fully or hegemonically determined. Still, the work of transforming carceral logics is proposed to be reconcilable with pragmatic action. This includes using law and political advocacy to save lives and create conditions in which incarcerated and institutionalized people may build solidarity around common causes.

Disability, Criminal Justice and Law similarly affirms that critical lawyering and pedagogy may contribute to prison abolition and disability deinstitutionalization. Yet Steele’s book is dedicated to showing how criminal and human rights law is steeped in oppressive concepts functioning to legitimate injustice. This suggests the enormity of the challenge of using law to promote transformative change. It also speaks to the responsibility of lawyers to work in solidarity with people incarcerated across different institutional contexts to expose the contradictions between a liberal-legal ethos of rationalized deprivation of liberty and/or medico-legal ethos of institutionalized care and the real-world violence of these carceral logics.

Steele’s book proposes a set of strategies through which lawyers and non-lawyers may “contest, rather than reify, interlocking dynamics and forces of oppression that shape the conditions in which criminalised disabled people are situated” (DCJL 22). This means using legal institutions to disrupt law’s complicity in settler colonialism and ableist and racist injustice, and bringing disability as a legal and social category into more direct relationship with projects of Indigenous self-determination and racial justice. Among the initiatives proposed are “community-led support, safety and accountability systems, remedying violence and harm, critical disability approaches to legal pedagogy, creative engagement with law reform, strategic engagement with human rights, and jurisprudences of disability tracing endurance and evolution in law of degeneracy and the institution” (DCJL 22).