#and i need to email the riso people. and i need to make a new print this weekend. and i need to research regular printing companies

[mildmayfoxe]

11:55pm having so many thoughts and opinions and ideas about my business and not writing any of it down. can’t wait to go to bed and remember everything i’m thinking about tomorrow :)

[publiccollectors]

From the discussion “Towards A Self Sustaining Publishing Model” hosted by Printed Matter.

Some things I have learned in over 30 years of publishing since my teenage days as a zine maker, administrating my project Public Collectors, and from working in the group Temporary Services and our publishing imprint Half Letter Press.

I have just ten minutes to speak. If only one or two things that I share are useful, that’s plenty! It took me decades to understand some of this stuff.

Use every exhibition invitation with a budget to print something. Use the whole budget to print something. Make something in a large enough print run so that you have something to give away and surplus that you can sell. Your publication can be a folded sheet of paper, a booklet, a newspaper, a poster, a book, or anything in between.

Be able to print at least something at home. Buy a cheap laser printer or inkjet printer, find a used copy machine, buy a RISO or some other duplicator, carve something into a potato or a piece of foam and print it. Being able to do at least some of the printing and production at home—even if it’s on a tiny scale—will compel you to print things that you might have convinced yourself not to send out or bring to a professional printer. Hopefully the ability to print impulsively and compulsively will result in good work. Figure out how to keep making things on every scale. Look for cheap used printing equipment on Craigslist. Team up with friends and buy equipment together that you can share. Start a printing collective in your basement.

Ideally your publication should cost 1/5th or 1/6th of the retail price to make. If you sell a $10.00 publication through a store, you are probably only going to make $6.00 or less after the store takes its cut. So ideally your $10.00 book costs $2.00 or less to make. Don’t aim to just break even. Aim to make a profit so you can keep making more publications and pay for your life. Publishing will probably never be your sole income but don’t lose money on purpose. Make things that are priced fairly and look like they justify what they cost to buy. The fact that you didn’t find a more affordable way to print something is not an excuse to sell something that feels cheap and shitty for a ridiculous sum of money. Good cheap printing is easier to find than ever before. Do your homework.

Figure out the cheapest and least wasteful ways to do everything. Ask other publishers where they get their work printed. Look for local printers so you can avoid shipping fees. Ask local printers if you can pay in cash for a discount. Ask printers if there is a cheaper way to do what you want to do by adjusting the size of your paper or the paper stock or some other small shift in form. If you print things yourself, buy the paper that is on sale. Design a publication around the paper that you found for cheap. Discount warehouses sometimes have good paper. Even dollar stores sometimes have good paper. I’ve even bought paper at flea markets. Costco sells an 800 sheet ream of 24 lb paper for $6.99. I use it all the time. It rules. I also recommend getting your jugs of organic olive oil there, but you can’t print with that.

Free printing is good printing. If you have access to free printing, use it. Free printing is like free food at art openings and conference receptions. It is one of those pleasures in life that never gets old. Come up with an idea that is based around the aesthetics of whatever free printing you have access to and make the publication that way. Eat the cheese and bread. Drink the wine. Make the copies at work.

Buy bulk shipping mailers on eBay. Find bubble wrap and other packing materials in the trash. Look out for neighbors who just bought new furniture—it’s usually wrapped in miles of packing material you can use for shipping books. Boycott terrible right wing fuckers like ULINE. Seriously, they give money to everyone horrible. Trump? Check. Ted Cruz? Check. Scott Walker? Check. ROY FUCKING MOORE? CHECK FUCKING CHECK! Tear up their catalogs and use them as packing material to protect your books. Make publications that have a consistent size so you can purchase cardboard mailers in bulk and get a discount on them. Buy packing tape in bulk. Buy everything in bulk. You can store your extra reams of paper under your bed or on top of your kitchen cabinets if necessary. Be like a wacko survivalist prepper, but for office supplies. Go to estate sales and look for the home office in the house. Buy the dead person’s extra tape and staples and rulers and scissors. I’ve been using some random dead person’s staples for years because I bought their staple hoard. Staples aren’t like meat and milk. They don’t expire.

I’m against competition. Try to avoid competing with other artists for resources. If you don’t truly need the money, don’t ask for it. Artists should have a section on their CV where they list grants they could have easily gotten but didn’t apply for because they are privileged enough that they don’t need the money as much as someone else. I almost never apply for anything but the one thing I do apply for and get every year is a part-time faculty development grant from Columbia College Chicago where I teach. It pays adjuncts up to $2,500 a year to fund their projects and seems to be completely non-competitive. My union negotiated to get us more money. I have used that grant to make over a dozen publications. The value of the publications I make and sell with each grant is about three or four times the value of the grant itself. Some years I make more from the grant than I do from the limited number of classes I teach. But I don’t depend on this grant to be a publisher and I’d still be able to make things without it.

Make things in different price ranges so everyone can afford your work, but also so that you can sustain your practice. Make a publication that costs $2.00, that costs $6.00, that costs $20.00, and make something special for the fancy ass institutional libraries that have a lot of money to spare and can buy something that costs $300.00. Likewise, make things in all different size print runs. Is there something you can print 1,000 of that you can keep selling and giving away for years, to enjoy that quantity discount that comes with offset printing a large number of publications?

Collaborate with people and pay them with publications (if they are cool with that) that they can sell on their own. Sometimes this ends up being better pay and more useful than an honorarium, and it helps justify a larger print run. But see what they need—don’t assume. Barter with other publishers and sell each other’s work and let each other keep the money. This helps with distribution. Sometimes it’s easier to sell their work than it is to sell your own. Help others expand the audience for their publications.

Fund your publishing practice by asking your friends who teach to invite you to talk to their college classes about your work. Use those guest speaker fees to print something. I sometimes tell people on social media: If three or four people will invite me to speak to their class, it could fund the entire next issue of X booklet series that you like so much. This has often worked. Also, sometimes their students end up ordering publications. Sometimes lectures about publications generate more income than the publications themselves.

Have an emailing list and write newsletters to announce new publications. Stay in touch with people who like what you do. Expect to spend a ton of time corresponding with people. Have some cheap things and cool ephemera on hand that you can send people for free when they mail order your publications. Reward people who support you directly with something nice that they didn’t expect. People like handwritten notes. It’s okay if they are very short but sign the packing slip and at least write “Thank you!”

Above all, know that publishing is a life journey and not a get rich quick scheme, or even a make very much money scheme. Enjoy the experience of meeting and working with others, trade your publications with other publishers and build up an amazing library of small press, hard to find artist books. Get vaccinated and travel and sleep on each other’s couches. Be generous with your time, knowledge, resources, and work. Tell Jeff Bezos to fuck off by never selling anything you make through Amazon. Find the bookstores that you love and work with them forever. It’s nicer to have deeper relationships with fewer bookstores than surface level interactions with dozens of shops run by people you don’t know.

Think about your publishing family. Bookstore people are your family. People that organize book fairs and zine fests are your publishing family. Other publishers are your family. People who follow your work for years on end are your family. Printers and binderies are your family. The postal workers that know you by name and that you know by name are your family. The person who doesn’t care if you make the free copies at work is your family. Over thirty years later, I’m still in contact with people I exchanged zines with through the mail when I was a teenager. In some cases I still haven’t met them in person. It’s fine! They are my family. Your students are your family—particularly once they graduate or drop out, as long as they continue making books and zines. Your family is your family, particularly if they value and support your publishing practice. And for this reason, this talk is dedicated to my late father Bruce Fischer, who let me use the company copier and postage meter when I was in high school, and to my mom who sat on the floor with me and helped me hand collate and staple my zines.

That’s what I’ve got for now. Stay in touch and with luck, and enough vaccines and masks and hand sanitizer, maybe I’ll see you at a book fair. – Marc Fischer • Thank you to Be Oakley of GenderFail for the invitation to present, to the other presenters Vivian Sming, Yuri Ogita, and Devin Troy Strother, and to the wonderful people at Printed Matter for hosting this! You should be able to find the video archived on Printed Matter’s YouTube Channel.  Presented on April 2, 2021

[nofomoartworld]

Bad at Sports Sunday Comics with Tara Booth

By Krystal DiFronzo

Tara Booth’s work is an assertive clash of color that depicts the most humbling and sticky situations. Some relatable moments include trying to pee while wearing a romper, cutting bangs into near oblivion, and stoned Amazon shopping (with the resulting surprise package hangover). My first introduction to Booth’s comics were through her Tumblr back in the golden age of cartoonists using that platform. Since then she’s had her work published by kuš! and Colorama. She regularly posts comics and in progress work on her Instagram @tarabooth. 

Krystal DiFronzo: The first thing I noticed about your comics is the density of information, there’s so much color and pattern all piled on top of each other! Also you use gouache like a painter, not like a cartoonist coloring between lines. The ghost layers of paint create this constant atmospheric movement. The reader is made aware of the hand and medium, unlike traditional pen and ink comics. Do you have a background in painting prior to your comics? If so, why the transition to comics or are they all part of a single practice?

Tara Booth: I studied painting and graduated with a BFA at Tyler School of Art. I used to work on big 4×5 foot canvases that I built, stretched, gessoed, and sanded over and over. This time-consuming preparation, combined with the preciousness of the material gradually grated on me. I appreciate the importance of these processes and I’m happy to have access to this skill set, but it wasn’t something that I ever wanted to include in my everyday art practice (due to my extreme and often debilitating impulsivity). Producing work in art school wasn’t a problem for me, but I wasn’t a great student. It became increasingly difficult to connect to ideas being taught in my painting and art theory classes, which were focused more on abstraction and conceptualism than direct representation or narrative, which is where my interest had always been. The language and concepts we studied felt really inaccessible and detached from my experiences as a highly-dramatic, drunk 21-year-old. I started to focus more on folk art, Lowbrow, and self-taught artists. I began reading more comics, and decided I wanted to make paintings that were direct, accessible, and inexpensive to produce—so I transitioned to working on paper with gouache, with the ambition of eventually making my own comics.

KD: Your comics also have a lot of unusual formatting choices that affect how you read it. They don’t have any formal paneling or gutters, they flow across the page almost like an animation or a Muybridge study. You can read the comic either left to right or as a single-paged composition. They are also predominantly dialogue-less other than their titles. What made you come to these decisions? What’s your planning process like?

TB: The unusual formatting in my comics isn’t something that I had planned. For the longest time I felt really stunted by my background in traditional painting. I bought a bunch of comics, and attempted  to mirror the techniques I saw, but working in panels always felt totally awkward. I had little experience with Photoshop, storytelling, principles of design… teaching myself how to make a comic felt like an uphill battle. Five years after graduation, I still hadn’t produced anything solid. I had kind of given up, and finally decided that making a shitty comic was better than not making anything at all—that I should worry less about what I think a comic is supposed to look like, and more on painting within the realm of my own abilities. Once I threw all of my preconceived notions out the window and forced myself to get to work, I actually started to get recognition for what I was doing rather quickly. Embracing some of my naivety and focusing on the painterly qualities in my work has compensated for whatever technical obstacles stood in my way. I still struggle with using text in my work. Until I’m more comfortable with my writing, I’m relying symbols, visual cues, facial expressions, and body language to tell my stories.

I like that you mention Muybridge studies, I look at them all the time. They’re one of my main influences. I love them!

KD: It’s a common trope of comics or animation that characters wear the same outfit. Like opening up a closet to rows of one identical dress. Your stand-in wears such incredible outfits in every comic, they almost become characters themselves. Do you have an interest in design? (Please make Fantomah leggings a reality.)

TB: Ha! I would love to work in textile design. In a failed attempt to simplify my life, I’ve ended up with a pretty boring wardrobe. I like to use my little avatar as a paper doll, dressing her up in outfits that I wish I owned myself. (Does anyone want to offer me a job?) I also use the clothing as a way to explore difference ways of drawing. To find different ways to use line, play around with abstraction and incorporate more surreal subject matter. I spend so much time working on this one body of work, I haven’t been prioritizing stylistic experimentation. It’s nice to have tiny t-shirt shaped opportunities to paint in ways that might feel separate from my comics practice. 

KD: I’m emailing you while you’re at Printed Matter’s LA Book Fair, what was the show like for you? Could you talk about your new book with Colorama? 

TB: The Art Book Fair was great! Like plenty of other artists I have a lot of anxiety in social situations, so it was stressful for me, but wow—so much of that melted away as the fair went on. It felt amazing to be surrounded by so many talented people, beautiful books, and all of the supporters who make this stuff possible. I was able to spy on a lot of my instragam art crushes. I loved watching how excited people were to buy my work. I got to see them laugh as they flipped through my prints, and I had some fun conversations. A few people even brought me gifts! But the most important and exciting part of the Art Book Fair was finally meeting my publisher, Johanna! She runs Colorama, a publishing house in Berlin. We’ve been communicating through email for months now, and it felt like the best blind date ever. The book she published for me, “D.U.I.I”.  is the riso printed story of one of the most awful experiences I’ve had. It was also one of the most beneficial things that has ever happened to me. I got a DUII in February 2016. I’m an alcoholic, and this was the culmination of years of increasingly toxic behavior.  Court ordered sobriety seems to be the motivation that I needed to change. I’m incredibly thankful that I didn’t hurt anyone. It’s a humiliating story to tell, but I felt a compulsion to draw it all out. I feel so lucky that Colorama decided to work on this project with me. It’s very different from my more popular, colorful work. I’m still dealing with the stressful and expensive results of that experience. Making the book was a huge part of the process of working through it. I tried to lighten it up a bit and make it silly—but yeah, its all true. 

KD: Your work is true to life but veers into the surreal. It feels like it’s in the same vein as work by Julie Doucet, Gabrielle Bell, or Dori Seda. Artists who told confessional stories of humiliation and embarrassment but added fantastical elements for comedic or therapeutic effect. What about writing semi-autobiographical work interests you? Do you see yourself leaning more towards fiction or towards memoir?

TB: I’ve always been drawn to autobiographies, in comics and in literature. I really admire a lot of the artists you mention, and confessional work like theirs is part of what inspired me to make comics to begin with. For years I’ve kept a diary filled with drawings, but its tricky. Really putting yourself out there is scary. The paintings that I post publicly, while totally based on my daily life, are drastically different in tone and content than what you might find in my journals. My comics are embarrassing, funny, absurd, relatable… they can be sad, but I think it’s easy to see how I use humor and fantasy as a way of dodging some of the more raw and dangerous territory that can make autobiography so potent. I’m glad that my drawings make people laugh, I don’t want to take myself too seriously and I’ll always make silly drawings… I guess I just hope that as I continue to make comics, I’ll find a way to add more depth to my practice, whether it’s by working on developing more complex fictional stories, or by being brave enough to express some of the heavier, and maybe less palatable aspects of my life. 

KD: Outside of comics, what artists or media makers are inspiring you right now?

TB: Well, first I’d like to say how incredibly inspired I am by artists like Marie Jacotey and Aidan Koch, whose work transcends the world of comics. I want the space between the comics world and the art world to keep getting smaller and smaller. These two stand out in my mind as artists that are helping to bridge that gap. I’d love to be a part of that transition. I’m always discovering new painters. Some of my favorites are Misaki Kawai, Austin Lee, Mogu Takahashi, Katherine Bernhardt (I’m inspired both by her paintings, and by the gorgeous Morrocan rugs that she sells) and Danny Fox. These people remind me of how powerful one large stand alone image can be. I follow the work of so many illustrators, but my favorites are probably Aart-jan Venema and Monika Forsberg, I’m always trying to figure how they do what they do. Who else… there’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening with ceramics that makes me want to get my hands on some clay. Benjamin Phillips is making great pots, it looks like it could be really fun to work in that style. Clay reminds me of Janie Korn, who makes really fun claymation shorts. Having access to all of these creative minds through social media sheds light on the infinite avenues that I want to explore in the future.

To order D.U.I.I, head to the COLORAMA webstore.

Dark Noise : An Interview with Chris Hammes

Half the sky, all your attention.

What We’re Doing This Weekend: 3.20-3.22

Endless Opportunities (Or Something)

MAINTENANCE #3

from Bad at Sports http://ift.tt/2mHQxB6 via IFTTT

[sonniquick]

(Sonni’s note: This article has special importance to me because of what I know Jamie has been through suffering with epilepsy. In addition, every inmate suffers when dealing with any medical illness, even when critical. No one would ever allow their own family member be treated with the lack of care inmates deal with. You wouldn’t let your brother layon the floor after a seizure not caring if they were okay. Epileptics often injure themselves. The level of anti seizure medicine in their blood is important. They should be housed on a first floor because they need to be carried to medical. The warden lied to me and told me they had too many prisoners with seizure disorders or needing walkers so he had to be on the second floor. I later found out this was fabricated. After a seizure they cuffed his legs and wrists and picked him up and carried him face down a flight of stairs. They had failed to get the board he should have been strapped onto, lying on his side. If he had had another seizure while being carried like that they would not have been able to hold him, and dropped him on his face.

What I don’t understand is why they get away with this, and every other rotten thing they I do. There are regulations for everything else the govt has their fingers in yet they can’t make sure prisons follow the rules and make sure the people they are responsible for are cared for, kept safe, feed edible food, educated so they can work, and sentenced to reasonable time – instead of being abused in a slave system for profit)

Photo credit: stemcellmd.org

Prisoners With Physical Disabilities Are Forgotten And Neglected in America

By Jamelia Morgan, Arthur Liman Fellow , the ACLU National Prison Project

JANUARY 12, 2017 | 9:30 AM

Dean Westwood arrived at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon in a wheelchair. Prison officials required him to surrender his property, submit to a search, and agree to administrative procedures like finger printing. This is standard practice. But unlike other detainees, Dean is paralyzed below the waist and has limited use of his arms and hands.

Staff at the Oregon jail didn’t know how to handle someone with his disability. They rough-handled his limbs and pulled his fingers apart to get his fingerprints. They stripped him down for a search, rough-handling his genitals. They forced his body into a set of jail clothing that was a couple of sizes too small, which caused Dean severe irritation below the waist.

They then placed him alone in an isolated medical cell for approximately seven days. Without the means he needed for assistance in moving around, Dean lay flat on his back in an isolation cell. He endured painful convulsions because the jail failed to provide him with his medically necessary anti-seizure medication.

The way Coffee Creek jail officials treated Dean Westwood is a travesty, and his story is one of many. Prisoners with physical disabilities constitute one of the most vulnerable populations in detention, yet across the nation, they are needlessly subjected to neglect, denied services, and placed in solitary confinement.

These prisoners rely on corrections staff for support and services every day, be it assistance in taking showers, getting dressed, receiving medication, utilizing law libraries, or visiting prison commissaries. Although comprehensive data on the number of prisoners with physical disabilities in jails, prisons, and detention centers across the nation are currently unavailable, as many as 26 percent of state prisoners report possessing a mobility, hearing, or visual disability, according to one 2003 estimate. When cognitive disabilities and disabilities that limit a prisoner’s ability for self-care are included, the proportion of prisoners with physical disabilities in prisons and jails increase to 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively. Moreover, as the prison population ages, reports indicate the number of prisoners living with physical disabilities in American prisons will increase significantly.

Despite these known facts, prisoners with physical disabilities are often denied the services they are entitled to under the law. Over 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits public entities from discriminating against people with disabilities, discrimination against people with disabilities persists in prisons and jails nationwide.

END PRIVATE PRISONS

Recent court cases have brought to light the serious violations of the rights of prisoners with physical disabilities. In March 2015, the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Southern California, agreeing to provide mobility devices and physical therapy for prisoners with mobility disabilities after horrifying incidents of neglect and abuse. In an ongoing class action lawsuit, prisoners held in Illinois state prisons challenged the denial of, among other things, alert systems that would provide warnings to deaf prisoners during fires and other emergencies in the state prison facilities. Another recent case against the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola alleges that corrections staff refused to provide a blind prisoner with a cane for 16 years. The problems, however, didn’t stop there. The prison also declined to place him in a facility with accommodations for the blind. As a result, he was forced to rely on other prisoners rather than prison staff to carry out his daily activities.

Neglect is only part of the story. Prisoners with physical disabilities are at constant risk for placement in solitary confinement and its attendant harms. Though few studies exist examining the physical harms to prisoners placed in solitary, research suggests that placement in solitary can exacerbate existing disabilities or chronic conditions, particularly in cases where adequate care and treatment is not available for prisoners held in solitary. There is also extensive research that shows that placing individuals into solitary confinement causes devastating psychological harms.

Worse still, prisoners are often placed in solitary not as punishment but for logistical reasons. For example, when there are no available and accessible beds in the general prison population, prison officials may place prisoners with physical disabilities in solitary confinement as a solution to overcrowding.

In Maryland, Abdul Muhammad, a blind prisoner, sued the Maryland Department of Corrections (DOC) for placing him in solitary confinement and denying him access to showers, phone calls, religious services, visitation and library privileges as well as educational and vocational programming. The complaint alleges that prison officials informed Muhammad they were placing him in solitary until they figured out where to place him long term. Muhammad remained in solitary confinement for almost six weeks. The Maryland DOC’s actions flout federal regulations prohibiting the use of solitary in this way.

All prisoners in solitary risk being denied access to prison rehabilitative programs and services, but the harms of this denial are particularly acute for prisoners with physical disabilities. And it is a harm that perpetuates further harms. Prisoners are often required to complete “step-down” programs to progress out of solitary confinement. When institutions fail to provide, for example, a manual for prison rules or disciplinary procedures in Braille for blind prisoners or sign language interpreters during disciplinary hearings for deaf prisoners, they are creating significant obstacles to prisoners with physical disabilities being able to progress out of isolation. Rather than ignore or harm these prisoners, states must address and accommodate their physical disabilities.

There is much that is wrong that needs to be righted in our prisons and jails. To ensure that prisoners with disabilities are guaranteed their rights under the ADA, criminal justice advocates and disability rights advocates must come together to address discrimination against people with disabilities and work to make the promise of the ADA a reality in prisons and jails across America.

ITFO Newsletter

Follow @sonni_quick       at twitter

http://facebook.com/jamielifeinprison . . .Blog posts and news about injustice in the world

Sonni’s Pinterest

You can also follow the blog by email so you don’t miss any posts. That, too, is in the info beneath the post

Prisoners With Disabilities Are Neglected in America

(Sonni’s note: This article has special importance to me because of what I know Jamie has been through suffering with epilepsy.

Prisoners With Disabilities Are Neglected in America (Sonni's note: This article has special importance to me because of what I know Jamie has been through suffering with epilepsy.

[sonniq]

(Sonni’s note: This article has special importance to me because of what I know Jamie has been through suffering with epilepsy. In addition, every inmate suffers when dealing with any medical illness, even when critical. No one would ever allow their own family member be treated with the lack of care inmates deal with. You wouldn’t let your brother layon the floor after a seizure not caring if they were okay. Epileptics often injure themselves. The level of anti seizure medicine in their blood is important. They should be housed on a first floor because they need to be carried to medical. The warden lied to me and told me they had too many prisoners with seizure disorders or needing walkers so he had to be on the second floor. I later found out this was fabricated. After a seizure they cuffed his legs and wrists and picked him up and carried him face down a flight of stairs. They had failed to get the board he should have been strapped onto, lying on his side. If he had had another seizure while being carried like that they would not have been able to hold him, and dropped him on his face.

What I don’t understand is why they get away with this, and every other rotten thing they I do. There are regulations for everything else the govt has their fingers in yet they can’t make sure prisons follow the rules and make sure the people they are responsible for are cared for, kept safe, feed edible food, educated so they can work, and sentenced to reasonable time – instead of being abused in a slave system for profit)

Photo credit: stemcellmd.org

Prisoners With Physical Disabilities Are Forgotten And Neglected in America

By Jamelia Morgan, Arthur Liman Fellow , the ACLU National Prison Project

JANUARY 12, 2017 | 9:30 AM

Dean Westwood arrived at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon in a wheelchair. Prison officials required him to surrender his property, submit to a search, and agree to administrative procedures like finger printing. This is standard practice. But unlike other detainees, Dean is paralyzed below the waist and has limited use of his arms and hands.

Staff at the Oregon jail didn’t know how to handle someone with his disability. They rough-handled his limbs and pulled his fingers apart to get his fingerprints. They stripped him down for a search, rough-handling his genitals. They forced his body into a set of jail clothing that was a couple of sizes too small, which caused Dean severe irritation below the waist.

They then placed him alone in an isolated medical cell for approximately seven days. Without the means he needed for assistance in moving around, Dean lay flat on his back in an isolation cell. He endured painful convulsions because the jail failed to provide him with his medically necessary anti-seizure medication.

The way Coffee Creek jail officials treated Dean Westwood is a travesty, and his story is one of many. Prisoners with physical disabilities constitute one of the most vulnerable populations in detention, yet across the nation, they are needlessly subjected to neglect, denied services, and placed in solitary confinement.

These prisoners rely on corrections staff for support and services every day, be it assistance in taking showers, getting dressed, receiving medication, utilizing law libraries, or visiting prison commissaries. Although comprehensive data on the number of prisoners with physical disabilities in jails, prisons, and detention centers across the nation are currently unavailable, as many as 26 percent of state prisoners report possessing a mobility, hearing, or visual disability, according to one 2003 estimate. When cognitive disabilities and disabilities that limit a prisoner’s ability for self-care are included, the proportion of prisoners with physical disabilities in prisons and jails increase to 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively. Moreover, as the prison population ages, reports indicate the number of prisoners living with physical disabilities in American prisons will increase significantly.

Despite these known facts, prisoners with physical disabilities are often denied the services they are entitled to under the law. Over 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits public entities from discriminating against people with disabilities, discrimination against people with disabilities persists in prisons and jails nationwide.

END PRIVATE PRISONS

Recent court cases have brought to light the serious violations of the rights of prisoners with physical disabilities. In March 2015, the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Southern California, agreeing to provide mobility devices and physical therapy for prisoners with mobility disabilities after horrifying incidents of neglect and abuse. In an ongoing class action lawsuit, prisoners held in Illinois state prisons challenged the denial of, among other things, alert systems that would provide warnings to deaf prisoners during fires and other emergencies in the state prison facilities. Another recent case against the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola alleges that corrections staff refused to provide a blind prisoner with a cane for 16 years. The problems, however, didn’t stop there. The prison also declined to place him in a facility with accommodations for the blind. As a result, he was forced to rely on other prisoners rather than prison staff to carry out his daily activities.

Neglect is only part of the story. Prisoners with physical disabilities are at constant risk for placement in solitary confinement and its attendant harms. Though few studies exist examining the physical harms to prisoners placed in solitary, research suggests that placement in solitary can exacerbate existing disabilities or chronic conditions, particularly in cases where adequate care and treatment is not available for prisoners held in solitary. There is also extensive research that shows that placing individuals into solitary confinement causes devastating psychological harms.

Worse still, prisoners are often placed in solitary not as punishment but for logistical reasons. For example, when there are no available and accessible beds in the general prison population, prison officials may place prisoners with physical disabilities in solitary confinement as a solution to overcrowding.

In Maryland, Abdul Muhammad, a blind prisoner, sued the Maryland Department of Corrections (DOC) for placing him in solitary confinement and denying him access to showers, phone calls, religious services, visitation and library privileges as well as educational and vocational programming. The complaint alleges that prison officials informed Muhammad they were placing him in solitary until they figured out where to place him long term. Muhammad remained in solitary confinement for almost six weeks. The Maryland DOC’s actions flout federal regulations prohibiting the use of solitary in this way.

All prisoners in solitary risk being denied access to prison rehabilitative programs and services, but the harms of this denial are particularly acute for prisoners with physical disabilities. And it is a harm that perpetuates further harms. Prisoners are often required to complete “step-down” programs to progress out of solitary confinement. When institutions fail to provide, for example, a manual for prison rules or disciplinary procedures in Braille for blind prisoners or sign language interpreters during disciplinary hearings for deaf prisoners, they are creating significant obstacles to prisoners with physical disabilities being able to progress out of isolation. Rather than ignore or harm these prisoners, states must address and accommodate their physical disabilities.

There is much that is wrong that needs to be righted in our prisons and jails. To ensure that prisoners with disabilities are guaranteed their rights under the ADA, criminal justice advocates and disability rights advocates must come together to address discrimination against people with disabilities and work to make the promise of the ADA a reality in prisons and jails across America.

ITFO Newsletter

Follow @sonni_quick       at twitter

http://facebook.com/jamielifeinprison . . .Blog posts and news about injustice in the world

Sonni’s Pinterest

You can also follow the blog by email so you don’t miss any posts. That, too, is in the info beneath the post

Prisoners With Disabilities Are Neglected in America (Sonni's note: This article has special importance to me because of what I know Jamie has been through suffering with epilepsy.