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HomeMy WebLinkAbout06-29-26 Correspondence - Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings - Decriminalize DisabilityFrom:Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]Decriminalize Disability Date:Monday, June 29, 2026 8:05:19 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Every paid subscription supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is nowhere near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! Decriminalize Disability If disabled people are to ever truly belong in Montana, we need to findways to meet their needs without locking them up READ IN APP Me (before the beard, or the far right) presenting at the WhiteHouse Criminal Justice Reform and Disability Forum. Last week, I wrote about how we need to invest in the “Infrastructure of Belonging.” I explained how our society envisioned and literally built housing, transportation, and education without truly considering disabled people. And I explained how we could reinvent any social system to include people with disabilities if we had the will to rebuild them. The resulting systems would include us as the default, not the exception. You can read more here if you missed that issue of the newsletter: JUN 29 This week, I would like to talk about another kind of infrastructure we rarely examine deeply. I’m biting off a big one here, I know. But I also know this area well, as most of my career has been devoted to it. We need to examine how our legal system turns disability symptoms into criminal acts and disabled people into criminals. When a disabled person falls into crisis, the infrastructure available to respond routinely relies on punishment or coercion. We don’t provide the necessary care to maintain health or fix the cause of the sickness. We implicitly, if not at times explicitly, blame the sick person for being sick and deploy systems originally designed for entirely different purposes: What If Belonging Was Infrastructure? DAVID CARLSON ·JUN 24 What If Belonging Was Infrastructure? Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice released an internal memo rejecting decades of disability civil rights enforcement and the legal principles. Specifically, it attacked the same “integration mandate” that Montana Austin Knudsen is attacking in the lawsuit he is waging down in Lubbock, Texas. The legal principle of the integration mandate has hel… Read full story Police. Jails. Courts. For a couple decades now, I have had the opportunity to see this infrastructure up close. I have also had the privilege to collaborate with system designers to reimagine how society responds to disabled people in crisis. What I learned is that our systems treat disability not as a natural human condition requiring support, but as a public order problem requiring control. This is because the systems we use to respond to disability-related crises are systems designed for public order. This is not because anyone in any of those systems truly believe that is the right or best way to respond to people with disabilities. Instead, I have come to know sheriffs, jail commanders, judges, etc. who fill the role of disability crisis response, not because that’s what they think is the best use of their limited resources, but because other people in power have assigned them that role by default and at times by design. Let me break that down a bit. People experiencing psychiatric disabilities, intellectual and developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, autism, cognitive disabilities, substance use disorders, and other disabilities impacting behavior routinely enter systems that were designed around crime rather than support. When they, a loved one, or unknown bystander calls 911 to get them help, dispatch more often than not sends a law enforcement officer. Many disabled people then find themselves cycling between homelessness, emergency rooms, jails, competency evaluations, institutional placements, and court involvement because the law enforcement called to respond only has a handful of options, none of which are optimal. Even though those people need support, none of those systems were designed to provide the support they actually need. So people get punishment instead of getting better. Now, I am not saying this is an accident or an unintended consequence. That would let too many powerful people off the hook. Quite to the contrary, it is our policy makers, budget writers, agency bureaucrats, and fellow voters who continually decide, booth through their active actions and their passive apathy, to use police, jail, and courts as the response mechanism. Whether because of affirmative decisions or simply kicking the can down the road, these people make a choice, and they should be the ones paying the cost of those poor decisions, not disabled people, police, jails, or courts. This is the infrastructure our society currently choses to use. And I want to tell you it is the wrong infrastructure. We built a society where it is almost always easier to access a police officer than a peer support specialist. Easier to access a jail bed than affordable housing. Easier to trigger a court process than a meaningful package of community supports. Easier to isolate someone than to understand them. Easier to control people, than help people. One consequence of this approach is hundreds of people with disabilities languishing in jails waiting for competency evaluation and restoration services for weeks or months, often deteriorating while confined in environments that worsened their disabilities rather than improve them. Some spend longer waiting for services than they might have served if they could enter a guilty plea and move on with their lives, but they cannot because when you are not competent to procced with your criminal trial, that includes accepting a plea agreement. We have normalized using jails as waiting rooms for disability services. Think about how extraordinary that is. If someone needs dialysis, we do not place them in jail until treatment becomes available. If someone needs cancer care, we do not book them into a correctional facility and wait for space to open up. Yet for decades, we have accepted a system where disability-related needs were routinely addressed through arrest, confinement, and court involvement. Those systems were designed to hold and process potential criminals and punish actual criminals, and once we put disabled people in these setting that were never designed for them, we started doing more harm than good. Disabled people in jail are disproportionately subjected to segregation, solitary confinement, denied access to programing that is inaccessible, have their medication interrupted or stopped, denied adequate mental health services, and held in conditions that frequently worsen disability rather than improve it. People come in needing help and usually leave needing even more. This is the criminalization of disability. We can stop criminalizing disability, but first we need to be honest about how we see disability. A society that fears disabled people builds systems of control. A society that expects disabled people builds systems of support. So let’s stop asking “How do we manage disabled people?” and instead ask: How do we build communities where disability-related needs are met before police, courts, and jails become involved? Imagine if we applied the same creativity and urgency to community support that we have historically applied to law enforcement. Imagine if every community that has a policy department, a policy head quarter building, police cars, a dispatch system, and a correctional facility to deal the with community’s criminal element also had a robust array of tools to meet the needs of the disabled community members: Peer support networks. Mobile crisis teams. Housing-first programs. Respite options for families. Disability cultural spaces. Accessible transportation. Supported decision-making supports. Meaningful pathways to employment and community participation. Imagine if our first response to disability-related distress was: Support instead of surveillance. Connection instead of confinement. Care instead of coercion. That is not simply criminal justice reform. It is infrastructure redesign. It is creating systems of support so we can end the default criminalization of disability simply because criminalizing is what the systems previously available were built to do. If the only system actually available requires a person be a criminal to access it, you will turn people into criminals. Conversely, if we develop the support infrastructure sufficiently, we can keep people in need of support as support recipients, and we never label them as criminals to get them access to services. And if belonging is infrastructure, then decriminalizing disability may be one of the most important infrastructure projects of the next generation because “criminal” is the most formal and definitive label applied to a lack of belonging our society has. If this resonated with you as a law enforcement officer, a judge, a corrections officer, or anyone else involved in the criminal system, please reach out to me directly. You may not know if, but Disability Rights Montana is the designated protection advocacy system for Montana and as such we can receive information from confidential informants under our federal authorizing statutes. 42 CFR § 51.45(a)(iii). If you have a story to share, perspective to offer, or solution you need me to know about, please call my direct line at 406-441-4801. Let’s work together to build the Infrastructure of Belonging we actually need, David David Carlson, J.D. Executive Director Disability Rights Montana p.s. this is a reminder that we arehiring for our next Advocacy Director You’re currently a free subscriber to Life Beyond Compliance. Upgrading to paid subscriptions supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is no where near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! Upgrade to paid LIKE COMMENT RESTACK Forward this to the most strategicadvocate you know DAVID CARLSON ·JUN 5 Forward this to the most strategic advocate you know This person will shape how power moves in Montana Read full story © 2026 Disability Rights Montana1022 Chestnut Street, Helena, MT 59601 Unsubscribe