Disability and the Colonial Carceral State: Ableism, carceral power and coloniality in the lives of criminalised people with cognitive disability

Criminalised people with cognitive disability in settler colonial contexts are subject to a litany of interconnected forms of state-sanctioned violence and oppression. Existing research rarely attends to the significance of the root sources of this violence and oppression: coloniality, ableism and carcerality. This thesis examines what the lives of criminalised people with cognitive disability in the colonial carceral state of Australia reveal about the logics, structures and practices of these core infrastructures of harm. To do so, it develops an anti-colonial/anti- ableist abolitionist theory and praxis to elicit and analyse voices routinely erased by colonising paradigms and practices. The findings show how the violence and oppression defining the lives of participants is rooted in, and materialises through, the colonial logics and technologies of dehumanisation, racial/ableist supremacy, violent neglect and victim-blaming. Participants revealed how surviving the ‘colonial institutional webs of punishment’ in which they are captured relies upon a range of transgressive acts; actions that are criminalised in a system that obfuscates the very causes of these transgressions. State police routinely inflict a debilitating war power on participants bodies/minds. Against the manifold forces of colonial carceral governance that attempt to control, medicalise, demonise and criminalise them, participants embody and perform multiple life-affirming strategies of survival and resistance. These findings give rise to the thesis’s core argument: that the logics, structures and practices of coloniality, ableism and carcerality are mutually constituted and cannot be separated – they are intertwined and co-occurring forms of violence and oppression. Three main theoretical and praxis implications flow from this argument. Firstly, transforming and eradicating the violence and oppression targeting criminalised people with cognitive disability requires analytically (re)centring the coloniality of ableist and carceral oppression. It demands rejection of reformist paradigms and practices and requires unlearning and denaturalising colonially constituted relations and practices. This process brings to the fore the inextricable connections between individual and collective transformation; connections that can move us closer to the abolitionist horizon. The anti-colonial/anti-ableist abolitionist theory and praxis developed in this thesis assists in advancing these pressing goals.