I Was Paralyzed By My Crime — And Now I’m Disabled in Prison

I am an army of one, fighting to keep my head above the putrid slimy waters engulfing the prison. I came to prison ten years ago as a quadriplegic, paralyzed from my armpits down with only 40% use of my arms. There is no one else like me in the prison system and the institution chooses to ignore me in hopes that I might vaporize.

I never experienced life on the outside as a person in a wheelchair and the initiation to prison life as a handicapped person was brutal. Moving into the world of disability, I had to learn the new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and new ways to move through society. I was ill-prepared for the environment in which I now found myself living in. The depth of my tragedy pinched the oxygen from the air, leaving me breathless and powerless. We all enter prison as flawed human beings and navigating the system as disabled in prison is overwhelming.

Prison forced me to be an active participant in my own struggle and it is vital for me to be a fierce and determined advocate for myself.

Comprising no less than 20% of the U.S., people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the nation. Sixteen million households in the United States have a person in a wheelchair living with them. I had never encountered a person confined to a wheelchair until six months before my imprisonment.

I lived in Steamboat Springs, CO., a mountain ski resort town where people were judged by how many days you skied and how fast you rode your mountain bike up the trail. We receive an average of 300 inches of snow annually which makes it problematic to maneuver a wheelchair. During spring break, we rafted the Colorado River with a group of friends and Paige. She was paralyzed from the waist down and her friends would carry her on their back when moving her during our 10 day vacation on the river. I went from gawking at Paige as though she was a zoo animal to seeing her as a funny, fierce and intelligent woman. Not being exposed to people with disabilities throughout my life made it easy for me to view “them” as a novelty. The narrative of “us versus them”  slowly erased itself from my lexicon during this trip. Little did I know that I would soon be part of the “other group.”

Systematic inequalities are everywhere in prison but they are magnified when one is in a wheelchair.

The heavy metal doors are almost impossible to open, the communal restrooms are unavailable, mirrors are too high to see your own reflection, and medical care is grossly inadequate and woefully substandard. I am forced on a daily basis to wait a vast amount of time to be able to use the elevator while abled-bodied people have open access to the stairs. Equal access is unattainable in prison when one is confined to a wheelchair. The most simplistic requirement is problematic such as sitting at the tables in prison. I am unable to sit at the tables because they have a solid base with no open space underneath the table top for my wheelchair. As a marginalized person in prison, I must challenge and transform the status quo and create social unease in order to initiate change. This place, our society, offers me locked doors, closed windows and rejection at every turn. With each closed door, with each slight shove and with each ignorant act, I rebel and push forward. A ripple of disruption accompanies me wherever I go.

There is a gaping and fundamental disparity between the choices granted to disabled versus nondisabled people. When encountering a world that does not see me or welcome me or include me or represent me, I believe the world is not for me. It is for all the “other people.” I scream a stinging truth that no one wants to hear about how the world is unforgiving and brutal at every intersection. The kind of freedom I strive for is not the same freedom other incarcerated people are fighting for. So again I am an army of one.

Our worries and concerns require a wider focus than an able person. The concept of ableism doesn’t just dehumanize disabled people; it strips non-disabled people of their own humanity because it dictates a very narrow concept of what it means to be a productive, valuable human being.

Equality is about asking society to reimagine our institutions so they validate all of us no matter who we are and how we move. DOC has never fought for me, only against me, and the people in power must be forced to grasp the magnitude of the injustices imposed on us. We need to point out their blind spots so they can flex their imagination to unleash a fierce wave of non-judgmental reform. Nowhere has the brutal notion of injustice been pursued with more ferocity than in prison.

It is hard for me to let go of the memory of my able self. My body had served me so faithfully until now. The crushing undertow of societal norms threatens to silence me every minute of every day. The annihilating loss of my able body causes an unarticulated sorrow that bears down on me unrelentingly. Sometimes the memory hits so hard it almost hurts. Not just in my head, but in my heart — a literal pain of loss.

Everything is measured, in my life, by “before” and “after” — and I have a strict regimen of deliberate forgetting that engulfs my brain which allows me to just survive but not thrive. I become exhausted from the overwhelming sense of grief for my life that was. The world of disability, the world I was now coming to understand as my own, is more complex and complicated than ever imagined.

Disability in the mainstream world focuses on what my body can and cannot do rather than who I am. Where can I see the gritty persistence that is required of disabled people? How can I aspire to something I don’t see? Mainstream inclusion is not prevalent in our society nor is it part of the general order of the world.

Challenging stereotypes about the disability experience and the worth of disabled lives is a never ending debate. I am not here to inspire anyone or elicit sympathy and I am not here to provide disability awareness training. Constantly confronting ableism is tiresome work and I do not want to be that token person.

I do not require permission from others to live my life as I see fit. While in prison, I have been forced to swallow my rage at every turn and focus on not allowing the system to break me down so that I resemble only a shadow of my former self. I know that chasing the person I once was, makes me miss the person I am becoming. The prison system is designed to slowly annihilate us and the medical providers continue to fulfill that mission. I loudly proclaim that I see the message that I am not welcome yet I continue to fight so I may live and hopefully thrive in the future. My life should be lively, full and vibrant.