Inside the prison, G.N. Saibaba used the toilets once every two days. A wheelchair user due to polio, he was 90% disabled. The Delhi University professor was not provided with a wheelchair for more than eight years.
He had been accused, many say wrongfully, under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. When those who were near and dear to him visited him, they could not even see him because the architecture was such that a prisoner would need to stand to be visible to visitors.
Having spent close to a decade behind bars, Saibaba developed several health complications, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and gall bladder stones. Post-operative complications from removing these stones led to his demise on October 12, 2024.
Miles away, on October 17, in Texas, Robert Roberson was set to be executed for the murder of his two-year-old daughter, a crime he is largely believed to have never committed. Roberson’s apparent lack of emotion for the death of his child led to his incarceration two decades ago. The carceral system could not fathom Roberson’s autism and framed him with the charges despite clear and concrete evidence against the charge. Roberson acquired a temporary stay on his execution just 90 minutes before it from a Travis County judge, thanks to public pressure. However, his disability has been under trial for 22 long years, and the onus is upon Roberson’s team to prove that he is not guilty.
The cases of GN Saibaba in India and Robert Roberson in the United States brings to the fore the twin aspects of the relationship between carcerality and disability. Carceral institutions are inherently designed to make the space extremely dehumanising to the disabled by paying no attention to their unique needs. Cases in point are the construction of autism as a crime or the presence of disabled-unfriendly architecture in prison visiting spaces.
Also read: G.N. Saibaba’s Death Was Not Unexpected but It Remains Unacceptable
Further, the carceral system enforces and perpetuates disability. It creates disabled bodies like in the case of G.N. Saibaba, who had come out of prison with more suffering – physical and mental. From Saibaba to Roberson, carcerality is antithetical to disability rights.
Carceral institutions, those concerning policing and imprisonment, are exclusionary. They are built on the foundations that ensure that the personnel working in these institutions fail to recognise and distinguish disabilities from criminality. The Mapping Police Violence Organization, based in the United States, maintains a public record of statistics of police violence in the US. Police violence here includes shooting lay people, usage of tasers, impact weapons, and force. They reported over a million such cases in the US. Such police violence, especially against the marginalised and disabled, is not a new phenomenon. On August 22, 1979, the New York Police Department shot Luiz Beaz, a “mentally distressed” person, 24 times because he had been wielding a pair of scissors in a slashing motion. In 1984, the US police killed Eleanor Bumpers and, in 2016, Deborah Danner, both of whom were identified as having had mental health disorders. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 40% of the people in state prisons in the US are disabled, making them an overly-represented population in the jails.
India lacks information on its disabled incarcerated population. The mere lack of statistics furnished by the state signals their lack of consideration for the disabled. However, certain instances get popularised by virtue of the incarcerated being political prisoners. These shed light on the brutalities that disabled people have to endure.
For example, Stan Swamy’s tremors from Parkison’s disease did not allow him to drink water without a straw and a sipper. The state institutions were hell-bent on not making a straw available to him. Eventually, he was given a sipper and straw after a court order. A cardiac arrest, combined with the carceral institution’s inhumanity, took his life on July 5, 2021. Stan Swamy is one among several such prisoners. Indian governmental agencies are notorious for hiding data. However, if we were to rely on the National Crime Records Bureau’s data, about 2,000 people die inside prisons annually.
The argument then is not to make inclusive, humane or disability-friendly prisons. The history of prison reform shows that state-sponsored reform – for instance in the US – has only meant increased surveillance, strict separation of prisoners into solitary cells, and expanding the carceral regime by placing GPS trackers on prisoners released on parole. Instead, the indignities perpetuated by carceral institutions should be understood as a design of carceral regimes rather than accidents that could be reformed. The very thrust of carcerality is to incapacitate deemed “criminals” in an effort to reform them. The reliance on torture inside these spaces is prevalent and well-documented. The design of carceral institutions becomes more pronounced when we understand how these institutions also produce disabilities.
Also read: G.N. Saibaba’s 2017 Prison Letter Sheds Light on the Rights of Disabled Prisoners
The usage of torture on Saibaba, for instance, is one example. As Saibaba’s book notes, sustained imprisonment and manhandling caused him to lose the grip in his hands – which he banked on for movement. The police are also notoriously known for disabling protestors using lathis, tear gas, rubber bullets, pellet guns, and other harmful technologies of control, exacerbating existing disabilities or creating new ones. In 2016, the police in the United States almost severed the arm of Sophia Wilansky by launching a grenade. She was merely protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline construction in the US. In the same year, the Indian Army used pellet guns against civilians in Kashmir, blinding several. During the anti-CAA protests in 2019-2020, the police were recorded thrashing four Muslim youths. One of them, Faizan, succumbed to injuries, and those alive are enduring physical and mental disabilities of various kinds. Besides, isolation and torture have been known to breed mental health issues inside a prison since its very inception in the 18th century. More recently, Israel’s actions had made Gaza open-air prison. Its genocidal strikes have left its people, especially children, with fewer body parts and a lot of psychological trauma.
It is crucial to reimagine carcerality in terms of its relationship to disability. Bluntly put, carcerality negates disability justice because it is ableist. Further, it creates disabled bodies. The irony is that carceral institutions use the cloak of justice to cover up the nasty mess they make. No institution of justice can possibly have a massive proportion of the incarcerated and affected population from the most marginalised sections of society. In India, it is the lower caste, lower-class, and Muslims; whereas in the United States, it is the Black and other people of colour.
The inner logic of the working of carceral institutions is not bound by national boundaries.
When institutions that claim to be promoting justice through punishment across the world are, in fact, violently disabling or slaughtering the population, how useful are they in promoting their stated goal of justice? It is high time we think of a world that is devoid of unjust carceral institutions.
Vipanchika Sahasri Bhagyanagar is a history PhD student at Purdue University, West Lafayette.
