Professor Kelly Fritsch has published a new UBC Press book, Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada

Professor Kelly Fritsch has published a new UBC Press book, Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada, co-edited with Jeff Monaghan and Emily van der Meulen. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, this collection examines disability in relation to various agencies and aspects of the Canadian criminal justice system. Policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement are among the areas of focus. The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance within criminal law systems; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion.

Sociology PhD students Abigail Curlew and River Rossi were two of the contributors, with published chapters in the book. Abigail Curlew published “#Endpoliceviolence: Nonhegemonic Bodies, Police Violence, and Abolitionist Politics”, and River Rossi published “Disability, Politics, and Collectively Reimagining Justice: Challenging the Ableist Contours of the 1969 Canadian Criminal Code Reform”.