What it’s like to be autistic in jail


We are now accustomed to seeing people of color suffering at the hands of ill-applied policing techniques on the nightly news. A lot of us are still trying to process incidents like these and others are actively defensive on behalf of the blue lives in our communities. However, we seem unable to see police mistakes and misconduct through any lens other than race in America at the moment, and that’s leaving out entire vulnerable populations who might not be people of color or people of color who are targeted for reasons other than (and including) race.

[PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT saying that we should stop looking at policing through the lens of race, but we do need to add other at-risk types of people to the conversation who keep suffering at the hands of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. I am also NOT anti-cop or unaware of the horrific shit police deal with on a grueling daily basis. I believe poor training and funding are to blame, as well as a criminal lack of mental health and disability services.]

For instance, being black in America instantly, visually places you in a marginalized underclass regardless of actual economic status or intent, but there are other ways to enter a targeted group other than having a different skin color. Being disabled or mentally affected in any way also puts a person at a greater risk of being victimized by a series of interconnected and deeply broken institutions. The other main groups affected by police misconduct are school children and very poor or indigent people of any color. God help you if you are some combination of the above.

Yes. School children.

While I have discussed the prevalence of police misconduct involving disabled people before, I’ve never talked about what the consequence frequently is when it’s not death: jail. Not being taken to a mental hospital or even a regular hospital. Not being connected with helpful services or a concerned case worker. Jail. The place where our society sends the people it doesn’t want to see anymore.

Sometimes I think there’s just two types of people in the world – those who’ve been held captive by a hostile force and those who haven’t. Either jail is something that makes your favorite shows more interesting to watch or it’s something that changes the course of your life forever. And makes all those shows look dumb as hell afterwards.

I’ve been to jail a few times. OK, more than a few. I’m not going to go back over why I ended up there, so let me tell you what there is like. People with autism have traits that cause serious problems in a captive situation:

  1. Sensory sensitivities
  2. The need to be in control of what is happening to us and our environment
  3. Difficulty understanding and immediately responding to questions or commands
  4. The need for medications to be administered in a timely manner
  5. Physical disabilities
  6. Not understanding unspoken rules
  7. Meltdowns

Jail is a sensory nightmare even for completely normal people who can mentally block some sensory input and regulate their emotional response to it. To me it was bright, loud, hard, and so very cold. All the time. Day and night it was buzzing artificial lights, slamming metal doors, clanking chains, people screaming and vomiting and weeping and laughing, COs shouting stuff I might need to hear. The smells and tastes ranged from pitiful to foul. The lights were never off and everyone had to put tube socks (called eye-socks) over their eyes to block out the light to sleep. I didn’t sleep.

This input alone caused my blood pressure to go into dangerous territory during all my stays. It was never treated although they were aware of it and concerned.

In jail you (and your concerned family) are never told what’s going on, what’s about to happen, where you will be taken, or who can be of help. The jails are not running a customer service model, in other words. Your concerns about what’s happening to you are purposely ignored, even exacerbated. This utter confusion and lack of control is horrible for anyone to endure (in fact, used by the Nazis as torture), but imagine you are someone who depends on a strict schedule and/or familiar surroundings to keep from having a serious meltdown.

Trust me, don’t ever have an autistic meltdown in jail.

They’ll drag out this puppy for you.

In jails around the country, any person exhibiting recalcitrant, repetitive, or any unusual or simply annoying behavior can be put in four or five- point restraint chairs and tased to within an inch of their lives. I still have my scars. I was in no way a danger to myself or others at the time, I simply, very politely asked for some time to calm down before they started sticking needles in me. They didn’t grant me that wish. I’d already told them I was having a “mental health crisis” which was the best way to describe it at the time.

In law enforcement lingo, this is called a “pain compliance technique.” Nice.

Strapping someone down for any reason and tasing them is still apparently legal even though the UN Council on Human Rights and Amnesty International have roundly condemned this practice in the USA.

Y’know. Because it’s torture. That’s right, America. We don’t just torture in Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites”; it happens in every city and county in America right in the middle of your community to the most vulnerable people you can imagine – the mentally ill and disabled. Because we can rarely fight back literally or legally. (No one believes what we tell them, if we can tell them, anyway.) So they get away with stuff like this and a million other malicious slights and dangerous inefficiencies.

Like denying vital medications even when breathless family members rush them to the jail with instructions about administering them in a timely fashion. This also happened to me with an anti-convulsant and several psych meds that one should absolutely not be suddenly taken off of. Or in many cases humiliating the physically disabled by not providing the most basic medical supplies they need.

The point of jail is not to keep you away from society to keep society safe: it’s to insert you into an economic system that profits from you being there, as long as you are someone who lacks credibility and agency. As long as you are a warm body that can be kept barely alive (if not entirely sane), you are treated like a product to be processed as efficiently as possible by understandably depressed and scandalously under-paid, under-trained staff.

Right now in my town which I love so much, a young autistic man is being held in jail after an altercation (domestic assault) with his aunt who couldn’t calm him down. This young man is underserved and now sitting in an environment that will traumatize him for years to come, without his family, surrounded by a bunch of tough customers who will not know how to deal with his differences. (Did I mention that jail is also a socially brutal place?) He is being denied needed medications and the jail is keeping his mother in the dark about his condition.

I’m very concerned that the above story will be the last we hear about this boy. When, O when, will we stop and take a look at the larger, more frightening portrait of American criminal justice and realize that absolutely anyone who is powerless or misunderstood is unsafe? Jailing is an industry and, as such, needs to both grow and find new sources of “raw material.” When you are sick or disabled, and therefore can’t either produce or consume enough for the economy, you become the commodity itself.