Remembering Institutional Erasures: The Meaning of Histories of Disability Incarceration in Ontario

Abstract

Disability policy and the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization process provide the opportunity to critically reflect on social policy and praxis, with a specific emphasis on the construction of disability through projects of social and spatial exclusion. March 2009 saw the closure of the last of Ontario’s remaining institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities, 1 and the move from spatially confining mad people 2 toward self-governance through community care are the current moments in Ontario’s history of spatial incarceration. Whatever the province’s commitment to policies of “inclusion,” the process of deinstitutionalization itself, and the ways in which these former sites of containment are being redeveloped, help illuminate a continuing legacy of exclusion. It is critical then to understand that “deinstitutionalization” does not equal inclusion, as inclusion must be conceptualized as more than simply the physical relocation of certain bodies. We argue here that the redevelopment of sites of disability incarceration works to, on the one hand, erase the history of Ontario’s legacy of segregating disability from the larger community through confinement, control, and surveillance, and at the same time works to further the policy rhetoric that disabled people are currently well integrated within community contexts. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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