Falling Away Into Disease: Disability-Deviance Narratives in American Crime Control

Abstract

Who in society is predisposed to crime? Many of us are familiar with cultural narratives that trace criminal behavior to some cognitive defect in the perpetrator. For instance, we might recall the persistent media allusions to Adam Lanza’s Asperger Syndrome after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, despite evidence that individuals on the autism spectrum are, on average, not more likely, and are quite possibly less likely, to commit serious crime in their lifetime. Similarly, popular narratives about the relationship between “mental illness” and violence are pervasive, despite the broad meaning of the terminology and a deeply-misunderstood relationship between psychiatric disability and crime. Stories are inherently intrigued with cause-and-effect, and so is law. Existing scholarship has highlighted the important role that criminal law, and the carceral state more broadly, have played in constructing the modern understanding of cognitive disability in the West. In particular, tenuously-biomedical constructs of insanity as “disease of the mind,” incompetence, and dangerous mental abnormality in civil confinement under state police power have themselves become cultural memes, helping to form societal understandings—and myths—about the interactions between neurodivergence, criminal predilection, and moral culpability. My observation is that in criminal law and policy, neurodivergent cognition does not seem to actually exist as a concept except in contraposition to the idealized sovereign subject of liberalism. Over centuries, and in conversation with popular culture and public norms, law has constructed its own amalgams of the “imbecilic” or “mad” criminal (who is not morally accountable), as well as the compulsive predator or psychopath (who largely is). Definitional shortcomings like these continue to exist in American crime control, and disability-deviance narratives have retained a stubborn appeal as a potential “root cause” of crime. Ultimately, I argue that cognitive disability—in its many forms—and publicly-endangering criminal behavior are not defensibly-overlapping conceptual domains to warrant their persistent invocation in law or policy.

Keywords: crimonology, disability, root causes of crime, mental health, criminal justice