Disability, Carceral Control, and the Micropolitics of Community Disintegration in Mental Health Courts

This study examines how mental health courts, despite being presented as therapeutic alternatives to incarceration, reproduce carceral control over criminalized people with psychiatric disabilities. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographic research in Cook County mental health courts, we integrate critical disability studies and carceral studies to reveal how therapeutic mandates extend punitive governance into community life. Adapting Gurusami and Kurwa’s (2021) notion of homebreaking, this article demonstrates how courts construct home and community as risky sites warranting intervention, particularly through racialized, gendered, and ableist logics. The analysis develops the concept of community disintegration to describe how mental health courts fracture housing stability, social ties, and autonomy under the guise of rehabilitation. By privileging psychiatric expertise and denying defendants’ epistemic authority, mental health courts perpetuate paternalistic care as punishment. This study advances anticarceral and disability justice frameworks that reimagine community care beyond coercion, centering interdependence, relational stability, and material support.