Being incarcerated is a bad situation for anyone. But what if you’re incarcerated and have a disability? That makes everything more complicated.
Federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are designed to protect the rights of people with disabilities. And if you’re disabled and doing time, you may well need those legal protections even more.
People who are disabled often require a different type of support or assistance to navigate the day. Getting through each day is often the primary goal of people in prison. If you’re deaf and your first language is American Sign Language (ASL), you may need the services of a certified ASL interpreter to fully understand important information, such as prison rules and schedules and developments in your legal proceedings. And what happens if you’re blind and need written material in alternate formats that you can read independently?
A lot of incarcerated people are disabled. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2016, 38 percent of state and federal prison inmates said they had at least one disability. The most common were cognitive disabilities, followed by ambulatory and vision disabilities.
But does the ADA apply to disabled people who are in prison, and to the facilities where they are incarcerated? In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Pennsylvania Department of Corrections v. Yeskey that Title II of the ADA, which says that state and local governments must provide people with disabilities an equal opportunity to benefit from all of their programs, services, and activities, “unambiguously” extends to prison inmates. A public entity is defined in the ruling as “any department, agency, special purpose district, or other instrumentality of a State or States or local government.”
Ronald Yeskey was sentenced in May 1994 to serve eighteen to thirty-six months in a Pennsylvania correctional facility. The sentencing court recommended that he be placed in Pennsylvania’s Motivational Boot Camp for first-time offenders, the successful completion of which would have led to his release on parole in just six months. But when he was refused admission to the boot camp because of his medical history of hypertension, he sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and several of its officials, arguing that this exclusion violated Title II of the ADA.
A district court dismissed the claim, saying that the ADA didn’t apply to inmates in state prisons, a decision an appeals court later reversed. The Supreme Court’s subsequent ruling was extraordinary, not just because of its astute logic, but also because it was unanimous, and was written by Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative Justices ever to serve on the nation’s highest court.
Since that ruling, the ADA and other laws designed to fight discrimination against people with disabilities, such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, have been used to successfully assert the rights of disabled prison inmates. In the 2021 case Mackes et al. v. Colorado Department of Corrections, two of the plaintiffs—Brian Christopher Mackes and Adrian Chávez—were legally blind. They were represented by the National Federation of the Blind of Colorado and other attorneys. The lawsuit noted, among other things, that the prisons in which the two were being held provided inmates with important documents, such as handbooks, regulations, and grievance forms, only in written format. This forced blind prisoners to rely on other inmates to help them with various tasks, including reading their mail.
A settlement agreement was reached in 2022 requiring that blind prisoners in the state be given access to laptops loaded with screen reader software, as well as typing tutorial programs, e-book readers, and other assistive technology. These devices were supposed to contain accessible-format versions of key prison documents, and blind inmates were supposed to have access to scanners and printers for the laptops as well, so that they could read mail and other printed documents. Also, blind inmates could not be denied access, based on disability, to educational, employment, or other opportunities made available to other prisoners.
In an appeal of another case from 2020, Marks v. Colorado Department of Corrections, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals said the corrections department was liable for an act of disability discrimination committed by one of its contractors. Inmate Nancy Marks used a wheelchair because she had spinal stenosis, which limited her ability to walk. She entered a program run by a contractor of the state, and one of the conditions for participating was that she remain employed. But one day she fell in the shower, aggravating her disability. Shortly after that, the contractor decided that she could no longer work, terminated her from the program, and returned her to prison. So she sued.
A lower court sided with the corrections department because, the ruling said, the discriminatory act in question was committed by a contractor. But the appeals court disagreed, noting that state agencies could not “contract away their liability for discrimination.”
Then, in 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the George W. Hill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, because the department had received a complaint from an inmate there who said he was denied a job working in the prison kitchen because he was HIV-positive.
The department’s letter of findings said, “After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have determined that Delaware County violated Title II of the ADA by excluding the complainant from working in the kitchen because he has HIV. Exclusion of an inmate from the program on the basis of HIV status is medically unnecessary and causes stigma.”
Delaware County argued that it was not responsible for what happened because the discrimination was committed by the contractor that operated the facility at the time. But the department’s letter noted that a “public entity like Delaware County is liable for violations of Title II of the ADA even where those violations were carried out by contractors.”
In another case from 2019, the Department of Justice reached a settlement agreement with the Hawaii Department of Public Safety (HDPS), which operates that state’s prison system, after investigating a complaint that inmates with mobility disabilities had been excluded from participating in a furlough program because of their disabilities. The case also argued that HDPS prison facilities were inaccessible to inmates with disabilities.
In that settlement, HDPS agreed to take several actions, including modifying five state correctional facilities to make them accessible for inmates with mobility disabilities; training staff about accessibility requirements; and paying $45,000 in damages to the complainants.
Making prisons accessible is important for more than just inmates with disabilities, too. I use a motorized wheelchair, and while I don’t intend to end up in prison one day, I may want to visit someone there. So it’s a good thing that the ADA specifically protects the rights of prison visitors who have disabilities.
Visitors with disabilities often face barriers because a facility might fail to accommodate those disabilities. Barriers include a lack of accessible parking, inaccessible entrances and visitation areas, and a lack of effective communication or policy modifications and accommodations that would make the facility accessible to visitors. Disabled visitors who feel that a prison has violated their rights under the ADA are entitled to use the same grievance procedure that the facility makes available to inmates with disabilities, or they may take legal action on their own.