Disability benefits should be the equivalent of a full time job on living wage. Things don’t cost less because you’re disabled – in fact you often have additional costs of living. You shouldn’t be forced into poverty because you are disabled.
Before anyone comes in with ’ but then ppl would lie so they didn’t have to work!’
Two responses
Universal basic income + better wages is the way forward
Who fucking cares? Not me. This insistence that ppl lie to get benefits and as a result benefits should be a fucking pittance that it’s humiliating to apply for just fucks over disabled people and is inhumane
Added to this:
No retesting of permanent disabilities.
It is huge stress for people with autism or lost limbs or so forth to be retested, especially when they’re often denied – every two years or less – their benefits and forced to appeal and then get back what they originally had (or less) … it’s weeks without income, which has sent many people homeless or forced them into short-term loans and debt they can’t escape. It’s barbaric.
Also, payments made during appeal – if they don’t deserve the cash, they can repay over time, but if they do then you’ve stopped them from going into debt and/or being made homeless. The whole system needs a huge overhaul, especially with the assessors being paid per person chucked off the system.
A few things about eugenics/sterilization in Canada from someone who knows too much about it for their own mental well being
(content warning for ableism, violence, misogyny and racism):
– Involuntary/coercive sterilization was one part of a multifaceted strategy of eugenics that included restrictive marriage laws, immigration restrictions, and segregation of people considered unfit for public space in institutions. Canada is still chock full of these structures of power, so it comes as no surprise that involuntary/coercive sterilizations continue.
– The biggest proponents of eugenics in its earliest form were political parties associated with “progressive” causes, including the “Famous Five” suffragettes and Tommy Douglas, who saw it as essential to preserving the integrity of the Canadian social safety net.
– Sterilization without consent was perfectly legal in Canada for 44 years, mainly in the Western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. In Alberta alone, under the Sexual Sterilization Act, of the total number of individuals sterilized, 64.7% were women, 49.8% were from rural communities, 40.6% were unemployed, 20.55% were characterized as housewives, 25.7% were Indigenous (a disproportionately high number considering Indigenous people made up only 3.4% of the total population in Alberta at the time), and 70.6% were under the age of 20. Most of the individuals who were sterilized were characterized at the time of being approved for sterilization as being “mentally unfit”, but a number of cases involved patients “recovering from retardation” after sterilization.
– Eugenics emerged in the midst of a moral panic about sexual relationships between Indigenous women and white settler men, and exaggerated hysteria about Indigenous and “feeble minded” women engaging in sex trade work.
– The Alberta Eugenics Board disbanded in 1972. Many of the people who served on the board are still alive. There is no record of them ever facing any professional consequences for what they did, even though the Alberta government and apologized to some of the victims after Leilani Muir’s lawsuit. This includes John M. MacEachran, who co-founded the Canadian Psychological Association and was co-founder of the department of Psychology and Philosophy Department at the University of Alberta. Until 2003, an award in his name was given out by U of A, “honoring his accomplishments”.
I’m saying all this because the horrors of involuntary sterilization and colonialism are not an accident. They’re a part of Canada’s national fabric. They’re a part of what made Canada a state. And the fact that they continue today, long after the laws supporting them were formally struck down, should come as no surprise.
“He fails at the simplest gestures of courtesy, from walking in front of the queen of England to his refusal to fly the flag at half-staff after John McCain’s death. At a listening session with survivors of a school shooting, he needed a note card saying “I hear you” to remind himself to pretend to listen to them. Curiously, Trump’s social autism is the source of his appeal. A Pew survey found that what Trump’s supporters like most about him is his personality, not his policies. They like his personality more than his policies for the same reason that men like the sex scenes in pornography more than the plots: Vulgarity is the point.”
The UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity, the United Nations poverty envoy has found.
Philip Alston, the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ended a two-week fact-finding mission to the UK with a stinging declaration that despite being the world’s fifth largest economy, levels of child poverty are “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”.
About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials, he said, citing figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He highlighted predictions that child poverty could rise by 7% between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.
i’m sure the bbc will find this worthy to report on any minute now..
Britain was in breach of four UN human rights agreements relating to women, children, disabled people and economic and social rights. “If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place,” he said.
This is probably not what I need to take along on shopping trips, tempting as it might be sometimes. But, I’m almost sorry this one is a custom job and already sold, though I probably couldn’t afford that kind of work anyway.
Reminded of this with the shillelagh mention, with at least some styles of those just straight up looking like plainer ball-headed clubs. Often with the head adapted slightly so it can double bette as a walking stick knob handle.
(The added spike in the OP really wouldn’t help much with that, either. Bit of a shame.)
Struck again by how not normal it really is that I’ve needed to purposely stick with a flimsy folding cane, because I really do not trust myself out in public otherwise. Given the level of casual shoving that’s socially acceptable where I’m living now, and my PTSD. (And it happens at least 3x as much when I am using a cane 😈) Haven’t hit anybody yet, but it’s been close.
As tempting as it may be to carry something sturdier and capable of doing more damage in case I actually need it, that really doesn’t seem wise under the circumstances. Know thyself…
violence against people who are in psychiatric institutions is not lesser or somehow more deserved if the people who are in institutions “deserve” to be there or “belong” there
aka people who hear voices and and communicate with angels and demons and God and ufos and who don’t feed or clothe themselves don’t deserve ANY form of abuse even the tiniest, slightest, faintest fraction more than someone who was “really sane” and ended up in an institution “by mistake”
furthermore, the ability to institutionalize and abuse “innocent” people wouldn’t exist if the ability to institutionalize and abuse “actually crazy” people didn’t exist
but my bottom line is being “crazy” does not make you worthy or deserving of abuse in any way
I appreciate this. How do we stick up for people with Downs Syndrome when it comes to their eugenic erasure? It’s this big nasty grey area that pits pro-choice against anti-eugenics, which inadvertently summons the anti-choicers to join the cause, despite the goals being different. The whole thing is so fucked up. What’s next to the table? Autism? Mental illness?
There are definitely already people campaigning for the eugenic elimination of fetuses with basically any condition identifiable in utero, and campaigning for diagnostics to get more diseases identifiable in utero such as autism.
Ultimately, I think the most effective way to campaign against eugenic abortions is to campaign against ableism in general. People seek to abort disabled fetuses because they believe that it’s impossible for someone with these conditions to lead a satisfying life, or potentially because caretaking for disabled babies and children is prohibitively expensive.
Both of these underlying beliefs can be addressed by having more visibility of disabled spokespeople, more widespread accommodations for these conditions, and better support systems for both disabled people and our caretakers.
As an example of what this type of campaigning against ableism can look like, I recommend ths video.
It’s a really, really simple message– the video sums it up with one text screen at the end: “People with Down syndrome can live a happy life.”
But it’s an effective answer to all the fears about “My child will never…” that expecting parents might have, and to the overarching assumption that life with disability isn’t worth living.
Disabled children struggle to get through to their parents all the time. When a disabled child struggles with something, they usually have to jump through hoops to convince their parents to believe them. Many times, nothing ever works. But they’re expected to have perfect self control. If they become violent whenever their parents refuse to accept them, they’ll be locked up. If they so much as yell, roll their eyes, or simply look angry, they’ll most likely be punished.
But when parents assault their children because “it’s the only way to get through to them”, I’m supposed to sympathize with the parents?
I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.
I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.
(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)
Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.
My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.
Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.
But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)
I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?
Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.
(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)
If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.
Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.
But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.
Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.
Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.
It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.
When I was in state prison in Georgia in 2013, I heard about a class called “Motivation for Change.” I think it had to do with changing your mindset. I’m not actually sure, though, because I was never able to take it. On the first day, the classroom was full, and the teacher was asking everybody’s name. When my turn came, I had to write my name on a piece of paper and give it to a guy to speak it for me. The teacher wrote me a message on a piece of paper: “Are you deaf?”
“Yes, I’m deaf,” I said.
Then she told me to leave the room. I waited outside for a few minutes, and the teacher came out and said, “Sorry, the class is not open to deaf individuals. Go back to the dorm.”
I was infuriated. I asked several other deaf guys in the prison about it, and they said the same thing happened to them. From that point forward, I started filing grievances. They kept denying them, of course. Every other class—the basic computer class, vocational training, a reentry program—I would get there, they would realize I was deaf, and they would kick me out. It felt like every time I asked for a service, they were like, fuck you, no you can’t have that. I was just asking for basic needs; I didn’t have a way to communicate. And they basically just flipped me the bird.
While I was in prison they had no American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. None of the staff knew sign language, not the doctors or the nurses, the mental health department, the administration, the chaplain, the mail room. Nobody. In the barbershop, in the chow hall, I couldn’t communicate with the other inmates. When I was assaulted, I couldn’t use the phone to call the Prison Rape Elimination Act (a federal law meant to prevent sexual assault in prison) hotline to report what happened. And when they finally sent an interviewer, there was no interpreter. Pretty much everywhere I went, there was no access to ASL. Really, it was deprivation.
I met several other deaf people while I was incarcerated. But we were all in separate dorms. I would have liked to meet with them and sign and catch up. But I was isolated. They housed us sometimes with blind folks, which for me made communication impossible. They couldn’t see my signs or gestures, and I couldn’t hear them. They finally celled me with another deaf inmate for about a year. It was pretty great, to be able to communicate with someone. But then he got released, and they put me with another blind person.
When I met with the prison doctor, I explained that I needed a sign language interpreter during the appointment. They told me no, we’d have to write back and forth. The doctor asked me to read his lips. But when I encounter a new person, I can’t really read their lips. And I don’t have a high literacy level, so it’s pretty difficult for me to write in English. I mean, my language is ASL. That’s how I communicate on a daily basis. Because I had no way to explain what was going on, I stopped going to the doctor.
My health got worse. I came to find out later that I had cancer. When I went to the hospital to have it removed, the doctor did bring an interpreter and they explained everything in sign language. I didn’t understand, why couldn’t the prison have done that in the first place? When I got back to prison, I had a lot of questions about the medicines I was supposed to take. But I couldn’t ask anyone.
I did request mental health services. A counselor named Julie was very nice and tried her best to tell the warden I needed a sign language interpreter. The warden said no. They wanted to use one of the hearing inmates in the facility who used to be an interpreter because he grew up in a home with deaf parents. But Julie felt that was inappropriate, because of privacy concerns. Sometimes, we would try to use Video Remote Interpreting, but the screen often froze. So I was usually stuck having to write my feelings down on paper. I didn’t have time to process my emotions. I just couldn’t get it across. Writing all that down takes an exorbitant amount of time: I’d be in there for 30 minutes, and I didn’t have the time to write everything I wanted to. Julie wound up learning some sign language. But it just wasn’t enough.
My communication problems in prison caused a lot of issues with guards, too. One time, I was sleeping, and I didn’t see it was time to go to chow. I went to the guard and said, “Hey man, you never told me it was chow time.” I was writing back and forth to the guard, and he said he can’t write because it’s considered personal communication, and it was against prison policy for guards to have a personal relationship with inmates. That happened several times. I would have to be careful writing notes to officers, too, because it looked to the hearing inmates like I was snitching.
Once they brought me to disciplinary court, but they had me in shackles behind my back, so I had no way to communicate.Two of the corrections officers in the room were speaking to me. All I saw were lips moving. I saw laughter. One of the guards was actually a pretty nice guy, one of the ones who was willing to write things down for us deaf folks. He tried to get them to take the cuffs off me. He wrote, guilty or not guilty? But the others would not uncuff me. I wanted to write not guilty. I wanted to ask for an interpreter. But I couldn’t. They said, “OK, you have nothing to say? Guilty.” That infuriated me. I started to scream. That was really all that I could do. They sent me to the hole, and I cried endlessly. It’s hard to describe the fury and anger.
Prison is a dangerous place for everyone, but that’s especially true for deaf folks.
Jeremy Woody, 48, was released from Central State Prison in Georgia in August 2017, after serving four years for a probation violation. He now lives near Atlanta. He is currently suing Georgia corrections officials over his treatment in prison, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Disability Rights Program and the ACLU of Georgia. Woody spoke to The Marshall Project through an American Sign Language interpreter.
The Georgia Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment concerning allegations in this interview.
This is appalling on every level- I want to know, are prisoners not protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act? Does this treatment not constitute discrimination? I realize obviously that things that are discriminatory happen every day regardless of their legality, but this is so blatant that I have to wonder if there’s some legal mechanism that strips deaf prisoners of their rights the way felons are stripped of their voting rights.
The ADA absolutely applies to prisoners, and in fact I used to work for a law firm that advocates for prisoners, and we won a lawsuit in my state that said that this bullshit and other types of non-accommodation of the disabled were illegal. We eventually were given authority to monitor the prisons for compliance with the ADA because the corrections department repeatedly refused to comply voluntarily.
Unfortunately, because of apathy and antipathy at the legislative level, these rights only get enforced in the judiciary after someone or some interest group sued, and that takes years. In the mean time, disabled and sick prisoners suffer.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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