The following is a response and reflection to the article “People First Language” by Kathie Snow. My first personal interpretation of the article was of a person on a rampage and I could not understand the content of the article. The author Kathie Snow seemed to be upset that people with disabilities are labeled, instead of being addressed by their name. In her article, it appeared that she was using false analogies. Her article compared people with disabilities and medical diagnoses like psoriasis, arthritis, diabetes. I am not sure if I agree with this analogy, because not all disabilities are a physical medical issue. Some disabilities are cognitive, social, or emotional and really have no relationship with medical disabilities. Although, it takes a professional medical person in some subfield of the medical field to diagnose a disability, it just seems that, there is no correlation between medical physical issues and disability. On the other hand, there were parts of the article that …show more content…
Kathie Snow’s article talked about the power of language and labels, and this reminded me of a project that I completed in my Visual Arts class. The project was created because of research completed by Dr. Caroline Leaf, in which she described how different thoughts and words affect the brain. Another aspect of Kathie Snow’s article in which she reveals that the real problems are attitudinal and environmental barriers, this brought to my remembrance, a paper that I wrote for my English class titled Passion for Prisoners. In my paper, I wrote, “the malicious attitude that Americans have cultivated toward prisoners contributes to the ineffective treatment towards them.” These are just a couple concepts that I have found interesting, but it took a couple times of reading this article to come to this
The third paragraph of this essay is primarily concerned with persuading the reader that the rate of imprisonment is on the rise, and that this form of punishment is now the form of choice in the United States. He cites the statistic,” 1.6 million Americans are behind bars today. That represents a 250 percent increase since 1980, and the number is climbing.” Lets look at this piece of information and analyze the value of such a statement. Foremost, he says “ 1.6 million Americans…” the key word here is Americans. Most readers of U.S origin in my opinion take this word “Americans” to mean people whom live in The United States. The truth of the matter is that the word Americans refers to those people whom live on either of the American continents. This means that Canadians, Mexicans, and Colombians are among those whom can be polled for this statistic. This statistic turns out to be misleading, when it is obvious that he is implying that these 1.6 million people are in U.S. prisons. Another fl...
Disability is a ‘complex issue’ (Alperstein, M., Atkins, S., Bately, K., Coetzee, D., Duncan, M., Ferguson, G., Geiger, M. Hewett, G., et al.., 2009: 239) which affects a large percentage of the world’s population. Due to it being complex, one can say that disability depends on one’s perspective (Alperstein et al., 2009: 239). In this essay, I will draw on Dylan Alcott’s disability and use his story to further explain the four models of disability being The Traditional Model, The Medical Model, The Social Model and The Integrated Model of Disability. Through this, I will reflect on my thoughts and feelings in response to Dylan’s story as well as to draw on this task and my new found knowledge of disability in aiding me to become
We live in a society today filled with crime and fear. We are told not to go out after a certain hour, always move in groups, and even at times advised to carry a weapon on ourselves. There is only one thing that gives us piece of mind in this new and frightening world we live in: the American penal system. We are taught when growing up to believe that all of the bad people in the world are locked up, far out of sight and that we are out of reach of their dangerous grasp. Furthermore, the murderers and rapists we watch on television, we believe once are caught are to be forgotten and never worried about again. We wish on them the most horrible fates and to rot in the caged institution they are forced to call their new home. But, where do we draw the line of cruelty to those who are some of the cruelest people in our country? And what happens when one of this most strict and strongest institution our nation has breaks down? What do we do when this piece of mind, the one thing that lets us sleep at night, suddenly disappears? This is exactly what happened during and in the after effects of the Attica prison riot of 1971. The riot created an incredibly immense shift and change not only in the conditions of prisons, but also in the security we feel as American citizens both in our penal system and American government. The Attica prison riot brought about a much-needed prison reform in terms of safety and conditions for inmates, which was necessary regardless of the social backlash it created and is still felt today.
Guards will no longer call you by name but by your number. For as long as you are there, you are that number. You no longer are treated like a human being but a number. Prisoners start to lose respect for themselves because of this treatment and on top of that, they are now given an abundance of other labels when they are released. Some of those labels include, “convict,” “criminal,” “dangerous,” and “antisocial.” When labels are given to an offender or a would-be offender in a mean manner, their risk of offending increases. This can also be predicted by the reintegrative shaming
The writer backed up her claim about the mass incarceration with ethos from wide variety of sources. She well used persuasive appeals such as logos, pathos and ethos throughout the article to shape it in a way that could persuade others. According to Unlocking America, “if African American and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates of whites, today's prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50%”. The writer tried to persuade the fact that if the incarceration were not racial in nowadays prison, it would be way better and the rate of people going into incarceration would be
Bibliography:.. **Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America (London; New York: Verso, 1999) 17-19. Lynch, Michael J. and Patterson, Britt, Race and Criminal Justice (New York: Harrow and Heinstien, 1991). *Ranese, Celia "Todays Prison system vs. Yesterdays Slave System" USA TALK 13 March 1999. *Palmer, Louise "Numbers of Blacks in Prison Nears 1 Million" The Boston Globe Seattle Post Intelligencer *United States Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics: Prison Inmate Statistics, Washington 1998 *Polowsky, Robert, "Liberal Legacy" Prison Activist Resource Center (weekly).
Alexander (2010) suggests mass incarceration as a system of racialized social control that functions in the same way Jim Crow did. She describes how people that have been incarcer...
People often think that a disability means that the person is cognitively incapable in addition to the obvious, or not so obvious, truth. I firmly believe that people should be labeled by their abilities rather than their disabilities. This is why I love the idea that the Deaf community defines itself as culturally capital-D Deaf rather than lower-case-d deaf, which is the condition of being unable to hear. When Drolsbaugh received strong reactions from using the word Deaf, it was because those individuals were unsure of what to do because of his deafness. I wonder what the world, or at least America, would be like if everyone understood this concept; more so, I wonder what it would be like if sign language was commonly taught in elementary schools in the hearing
It could be said that in modern industrial society, Disability is still widely regarded as tragic individual failing, in which its “victims” require care, sympathy and medical diagnosis. Whilst medical science has served to improve and enhance the quality of life for many it could be argued that it has also led to further segregation and separation of many individuals. This could be caused by its insistence on labelling one as “sick”, “abnormal” or “mental”. Consequently, what this act of labelling and diagnosing has done, is enforce the societal view that a disability is an abnormality that requires treatment and that any of its “victims” should do what is required to be able to function in society as an able bodied individual.
Second, in an environment in which the concentration is on punishment, politicians and the American public are frustrated with prisoners living in a “resort-like” facility which might include opportunities to participate in: watching cable TV, weightlifting rooms, free education, religious affiliations, and libraries. The average cost of keeping a prisoner...
The World Health Organisation, WHO, (1980) defines disability in the medical model as a physical or mental impairment that restricts participation in an activity that a ‘normal’ human being would partake, due to a lack of ability to perform the task . Michigan Disability Rights Coalition (n.d.) states that the medical model emphasizes that there is a problem regarding the abilities of the individual. They argue that the condition of the disabled persons is solely ‘medical’ and as a result the focus is to cure and provide treatment to disabled people (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition, 2014). In the medical model, issues of disability are dealt with according to defined government structures and policies and are seen as a separate issue from ordinary communal concerns (Emmet, 2005: 69). According to Enabling Teachers and Trainers to Improve the Accessibility of Adult Education (2008) people with disabilities largely disa...
Upon incarceration, a person loses a host of things. First, a person loses their freedom. Second, a person loses their dignity. Third, a person loses their basic human rights. Although America remains at the epicenter of democracy, its prison system begs to differ. Furthermore, inmates incarcerated around the country all experience an unmatched level of dehumanization. This remains attributed to the greed of several businesses combined with the passing of insensitive laws. In particular, inmate communication companies seem to do the most damage to the spirit of inmates. Although they advertise how they intend on saving inmates money, their actions remain otherwise.
Disability: Any person who has a mental or physical deterioration that initially limits one or more major everyday life activities. Millions of people all over the world, are faced with discrimination, the con of being unprotected by the law, and are not able to participate in the human rights everyone is meant to have. For hundreds of years, humans with disabilities are constantly referred to as different, retarded, or weird. They have been stripped of their basic human rights; born free and are equal in dignity and rights, have the right to life, shall not be a victim of torture or cruelty, right to own property, free in opinion and expression, freedom of taking part in government, right in general education, and right of employment opportunities. Once the 20th century
The first thought that crosses the mind of an able-bodied individual upon seeing a disabled person will undoubtedly pertain to their disability. This is for the most part because that is the first thing that a person would notice, as it could be perceived from a distance. However, due to the way that disability is portrayed in the media, and in our minds, your analysis of a disabled person rarely proceeds beyond that initial observation. This is the underlying problem behind why disabled people feel so under appreciated and discriminated against. Society compartmentalizes, and in doing so places the disabled in an entirely different category than fully able human beings. This is the underlying theme in the essays “Disability” by Nancy Mairs, “Why the Able-Bodied Just Don’t Get it” by Andre Dubus, and “Should I Have Been Killed at Birth?” by Harriet Johnson.
French, S. & Swain, J. 2008. Understanding Disability: A Guide for Health Professionals. Philadelphia: Churchilll Livingstone Elsevier: 4