It is time to recognize the similarities between systemic police violence and systems that imprison people, how race and disability intertwine, and how all congregate institutions including prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric institutions, and immigrant detention camps arise from systems designed to oppress those whom society devalues.
Covid-19 has killed over 32,750 disabled people in substandard nursing homes in the United States, with a disparate number of those being people of color, (https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-nursing-homes-racial-disparity.html). National ADAPT is compelled to speak out against this widespread and horrifying human rights catastrophe.
ADAPT strongly denounces the ongoing human rights violations committed against disabled people in all congregate care settings, and we reject the notion that age and underlying conditions sufficiently explain the outrageously high rate of death in these institutions. The occurrence of neglect, abuse, terror, and despair that disabled people experience daily in these facilities is well documented. Yet we continue to be socially removed from our families, homes, and communities in the name of cost-effectiveness, efficiency, or worse, for the convenience and comfort of non-disabled society, and the profit of health care professionals and shareholders.
No longer will we excuse or abide the socially accepted biases that dehumanize disabled people.
No longer will we accept the tired rationalization of “where else are we going to put them” that has been used to justify sending us to die in dismal human warehouses; nor, when deaths are expedited, that they are a natural outcome of age, chronic illness, and impairment, rather than the neglect and abuse fostered by ableist social structures and attitudes.
National ADAPT and our state chapters will no longer abide callous professionals, ignorant of disability theory and rights, who exploit us for their own personal career advancement, and for the advancement of their professions and agencies. We condemn the nonchalant discussions that we must regularly endure in professional forums—discussions, without us, about what is best for us, and questions about where significantly disabled people should be warehoused without any thought to community integration—and everyday discussion that dismisses or erases the annihilation of tens of thousands of disabled people as merely a “natural process” or even beneficial to society as a whole. We equally condemn the doctors with financial interests in congregate care institutions, who sign orders sending us there, again with no consideration of home and community settings and services.
No longer will we accept the naive and hollow promises of institutional reform, as disabled people have endured neglect and abuse in institutions for over a hundred years without significant change despite countless acts, reviews, legislation, and congressional hearings. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently found that 82% of American nursing homes had an infection prevention and control deficiency cited in in one or more years, with about half of these facilities having had persistent problems and having been cited across multiple years. We need more diversion from institutions of all kinds, and more affordable, accessible integrated housing in our communities.
It is time to come to terms with the reality that abuse, neglect, and death are not isolated incidents that can be addressed individually through underfunded Ombudsman programs, insincere band aids of ‘culture change,’ or through impotent state regulatory agencies that remain stuck in antiquated medical model perspectives of disability. Instead, we must admit that dehumanization is the very bedrock of institutional segregation.
There is no excuse for the disregard of our basic humanity, especially 56 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and 21 years after the United States Supreme Court Olmstead decision. Enough is enough!
*This number does not include death tolls from states that have been negligent in reporting infections and deaths in assisted living facilities, state institutions, groups homes, or other congregate ‘care’ settings, or who have reported to CDC, but have chosen not to make their numbers public.