Research Report
Behavioral Health Disabilities June 23, 2025
Expecting Difference: Reorienting Disability Strategy for Jail Decarceration
Among disabled people in jails, certain groups require disability access that cannot be readily addressed by generalist understandings of “ADA compliance” or by disability as a medical condition. Consequently, failure to fully consider disability dynamics within jails and reentry can lead to negative health impacts, decreased jail safety, and recidivism. It is time to see disability not as a checklist of disability rights compliance tasks, but as a breakthrough lens that can advance the work of making all communities safer, and thus to support all people to achieve their true potential.
As a type of nonprofit service and advocacy organization known as a Center for Independent Living, led by and for people with all kinds of disabilities, Access Living has spent more than forty years changing society so that everyone, disabled or not, can thrive. In the last six years, with the support of the MacArthur Safety and Justice Challenge, we have sought to intentionally rethink disability strategies for decarceration through reducing the use of jails. We have done this through the lived experience of our staff, as well as through rooting our work in relationships with all kinds of people with disabilities, including those who are system-involved.
This report reviews problems faced by specific under-addressed disability groups whose experiences highlight systems failures. We then identify systemic gaps created by a misalignment of philosophic approaches toward people with disabilities. The report benefits from the insights of system-impacted Access Living community members with disabilities over the years, some of whose anecdotal observations are shared in this paper. We then highlight disability-centered strategies from both jail- and community-based disability programs that offer disability justice-oriented pathways to reducing jail use and over-incarceration of people with disabilities.
