DisCrim Toolkit
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Policing
Examining how disability is criminalized in policing, particularly at the intersections of race, class, and gender. It focuses on how people are disproportionately targeted, harmed, or misidentified as threats due to ableist and racist policing practices.
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Education
Exploring how disability is criminalized in education through policies and practices that disproportionately discipline, surveil, and exclude disabled students. The education system often responds to disability with punishment rather than support.
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Healthcare
Investigating how disability is criminalized in healthcare settings, particularly for communities at the intersections of race, class, and gender. It examines how medical institutions and providers respond to disability with surveillance, coercion, and punishment.
OUT NOW
Kate Caldwell, PhD, Jamelia Morgan, JD, & Karima Itayem
This brief exposes how schools criminalize disability, especially for students of color, by responding to disability and trauma with punishment, surveillance, and law enforcement instead of support. It traces how these practices feed the school-prison nexus and argues for transformative, justice-centered approaches to education.
What is DisCrim?
The criminalization of disability often refers to the ways disabled people are disproportionately targeted, surveilled, policed, incarcerated, and killed.
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Laws & Policing
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Disciplinary Tools
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Policies
43%
Disabled people have a 43% likelihood of being arrested by age 28
55%
Black disabled people have a 55% likelihood of being arrested by age 28
50%
of people killed by police are disabled
Join the Collective!
The DisCrim Collective invites scholars, organizers, advocates, and community members to join in confronting the systems that target, police, incarcerate, and harm disabled people—especially those who are multiply marginalized. Our work explores how DisCrim manifests in policing, education, and healthcare, while remaining open to emerging and overlooked sites where state violence and institutional neglect operate. As we expand our focus beyond the U.S., we are building transnational dialogues and holding workshops to deepen our collective understanding and strategy. If you are working to expose or challenge the criminalization of disability in any form or region, we welcome you into this growing community of resistance, care, and justice.