3:37pm May 25, 2014

Yeah, your news channel isn’t biased or anything…

Of all the things to lead with when talking about deinstitutionalization, it was “Hundreds of people lost their jobs because we’re moving developmentally disabled people out of state institutions.”

Honestly? If the hundreds of people were good at taking care of people in a non-institutional way, there are just as many jobs needed to take care of people in our own homes. One of the biggest lobbies to keep large institutions open are things like the Union of Psychiatric Technicians and other groups of people who work there.

We don’t have large institutions for DD people in my state anymore at all. And the local agency that provides my services and the services of most DD people (mostly in our own homes) in the area, employs more people than any other company in town. So it’s not like there isn’t employment when state institutions go away.

Of course, you do have to look at whether employees of state institutions are capable of taking care of disabled people in a way that doesn’t just replicate institutional power dynamics, before rehiring people for community jobs. I’ve seen really ugly things happen when institution workers are employed in community programs, with no screening or training to see if they’ll just pull all the same institutional bullcrap they did in institutions.

And I do understand that often state institutions are huge sources of employment.

But.

I can’t ever, ever put the employment of institution workers, over the human rights of people forced to live in disability-segregated environments against our wills.

Because there is nothing that can justify what is done to people in institutions. Nothing.

And framing deinstitutionalization as an employment issue is just another way of saying that nondisabled people are the ones who matter, here, and disabled people are just faceless voiceless unpersons who get moved around to suit everyone’s political whims.