In Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health (“Embodied Injustice”), Professor Mary Crossley argues that “attending to race-and-disability intersections (at both individual and social movement levels) is critically important to achieving progress toward health equity” (p. 8). Ableism and racism permeate core socio-legal institutions in the United States, leading people with disabilities (PWD) and Black people to experience worse health outcomes than other groups (p. 12). These groups continue to experience unethical and sometimes even abusive treatment in hospitals and other sites of health care delivery. In other areas of law and policy, such as housing, education, and policing, PWD and Black people also experience conditions that threaten health and wellbeing. Embodied Injustice calls for intersectional grassroots efforts to address these harms.
Our Review focuses on the role that criminal law enforcement plays in exacerbating health inequities experienced by PWD and Black people. Criminal law enforcement acts directly on the bodies of PWD and Black people. It also interacts with and reinforces other mechanisms—health care, education, and housing—that Crossley identifies as determinants of such inequities (pp. 12–13). We argue that addressing these harms re-quires that we not only extricate criminal authority from these areas of law and policy but that we also rethink the operation of criminal law enforcement itself through the prism of grassroots intersectionality. In doing so, we offer a concrete example of Embodied Injustice’s vision that supports Crossley’s analysis.