The Trump administration has moved to close Social Security offices and threatened criminal penalties for people whom it determines to have engaged in “fraud.” And the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act budget passed last week by the House would, if enacted without changes, strip Medicaid benefits from over 10 million people, including millions of disabled people. It is all moving too fast to know what the latest news will be as you read this, but it’s clear Republicans have their sights set on further gutting already meager benefits programs.
The connection between entitlement programs and mass incarceration is not necessarily self-evident, but it is profound. As I researched the relationship between disability and incarceration for my book A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice, I found that benefits are not peripheral to mass incarceration, they are at the heart of it. Eliminating or reducing benefits, or making them harder to get, is part of what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized government abandonment.” Summarizing Gilmore, epidemiologists Taylor Riley, Julia P. Schleimer, and Jaquelyn L. Jahn define organized government abandonment as follows:
the intentional disinvestment in communities leading to the gradual disappearance of safe housing, reliable jobs, clean water, healthy food, and a social safety net which, in turn, create opportunities for privatized social services, redevelopment, and increased police presence and criminalization as a way to fill the cracks of a compromised social infrastructure and maintain hegemonic social order.
As abolitionists know, certain neighborhoods aren’t “safer” because there are more police there, but because there are more resources. The majority of incarcerated people are poor, which shows that resources keep people safe from incarceration. When the government takes away resources from a community—whether it’s schools, health care, libraries, benefits, or anything else—they are enacting the abandonment that Gilmore identified.
It’s important to understand the relationship between benefits and incarceration and how closely the further erosion of the social safety net tracks with the spike of incarceration in the United States. We need to know how we got here so we can move toward abolition.
PRWORA and Incarceration
Republicans aren’t the only ones gutting these programs. Making welfare and disability benefits harder to receive is a project that has long enjoyed bipartisan support. In his 1993 State of the Union, President Bill Clinton promised Congress that he would end “welfare as we know it.” He did this by working with them to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which eliminated the main program that provided assistance to poor families and made it much more difficult to get benefits. The 1996 bill introduced so many restrictions for government aid that many people lost much-needed assistance and were never able to recover it.
After the implementation of the law, which Clinton perversely considered one of the signature achievements of his administration, incarceration rates skyrocketed. The effect was synergistic, in part because the 1996 welfare reform bill included a prohibition on receiving certain federal benefits after conviction on some drug-related felonies. Those affected by the ban were more likely to be rearrested than those who weren’t. And those impacted by loss of benefits were more likely to be incarcerated in the first place. People of color, especially Black and Indigenous people, are disproportionately more likely to be incarcerated as well as to receive benefits. There is a significant relationship between a lack of access to health care and involvement in the criminal legal system, which is especially relevant as health insurance itself is tied to many benefit programs. The fewer benefits people have, the more those people will be incarcerated. These intersecting forms of marginalization form a vicious circle.
Therefore, it is crucial for abolitionists and anyone concerned with mass incarceration to understand the importance of benefits and get involved in the fight to not just protect the current benefit programs, but to increase the availability of benefit programs as well as the dollar value of those benefits per household.
SSI/SSDI
This brings us to disability benefits. I’m going to focus on the benefits administered by the Social SecurityAdministration (SSA), because those are the main “disability benefits” that exist, and they are what the Trump administration is focusing on. A few different benefits programs are disbursed by the SSA, and all require individuals to be elderly or disabled to qualify for their own benefits. (The SSA also administers “survivor” benefits, but those are based on the benefit eligibility of the person who died.) The following discussion is informed by my experience working as an attorney who helped my clients receive disability benefits.
Two of the main social safety–net programs under threat from the Trump administration are Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). These are the main programs that people are talking about when they refer to “disability” benefits. Both programs require submitting extensive proof of disability in the form of medical records to prove you meet the SSA’s definition of disability. The regulations around what needs to be proven is almost arbitrary. For example, claimants can be denied disability if the assigned administrative law judge feels there is any job that the potential beneficiary could theoretically do, even if the claimant has no actual qualifications and/or the job doesn’t exist in their location.
Another huge problem is that the programs are unavailable to many people who are disabled, whether because their disabilities don’t fit squarely in the way the SSA defines disability, or because there are not adequate medical records to support the claim. The records requirement is especially cruel in a country that forces people to have insurance to get medical attention. It becomes extremely circular: once someone qualifies for SSI or SSDI, they will usually also then be covered under Medicaid or Medicare, but not until after they have been deemed disabled. In other words, the thing that many poor disabled people need to prove the existence of their disability will not be provided to them until after they prove their disability.
Another of the many “quirks” of the system is that there are often untenable waiting periods before benefits kick in. For example, after qualifying for SSDI, it takes twenty-four months of disability coverage before Medicare kicks in. This means that for two years, a person cannot work—the fundamental requirement to qualify for SSDI is inability to work—so therefore they cannot get medical insurance through an employer. But they also cannot yet receive medical care through Medicare, even if they have already been determined to be disabled.
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The main differences between eligibility for SSDI and SSI are the work requirement and means testing. SSDI also tends to be a little less vulnerable to cuts because it is seen as “insurance” payments. To qualify for SSDI—which has greater benefit payments, fewer work restrictions, and no asset limit—you need to prove that you have worked for five of the past ten years. This automatically disqualifies anyone who has always been too disabled to work or who is coming out of long-term incarceration.
SSI is means tested, which means having anything above poverty-level income or assets will cause one to lose the benefit, even though one remains disabled (and poor). To qualify for SSI, which provides income assistance, an individual has to show that not only are they disabled, but they are also very poor: for 2025, the asset limit for an individual is $2,000. Many disabled people cannot even marry because a partner’s income and assets are also counted and it would cause them to lose SSI. (The asset limit for couples is a little higher, but still unconscionable at $3,500.) To top it off, the maximum monthly SSI benefit is a mere $967 per month. This forces disabled people to live in poverty.
By definition, we are talking about multiply marginalized people who are also disproportionately marginalized in other ways, too—especially race. It is not a coincidence, then, that the people intended to receive SSI (though often, as above, blocked from doing so) are the same people who make up a majority of the prison population: by some estimates, 66 percent of incarcerated people are disabled. At the same time, the kinds of medical records that carceral facilities keep are not usually detailed enough to support a claim for benefits (and prisons are sites of rampant medical neglect), so many people who have a history of incarceration may not qualify SSI solely because of documentation issues.
Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is great and an important part of the abolitionist project, but it was never intended to let the government off the hook for its abandonment.
One of the greatest purposes of mutual aid is to create solidarity to mobilize for political systemic changes. Activist lawyer Dean Spade explains:
Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First, we need to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle the underlying causes of these crises.
Mutual aid is part of a path to mobilization, not the end goal in itself.
In other words, the world we dream of—and work toward—should not allow the state to hoard the resources we are forced (overtly and covertly) to give them. Mutual aid is important for movement building and for literal survival, but it alone never will—and was never intended to—make systemic change. It is part of how we make systemic change, it is not the change in itself.
Abolition is a theoretical concept, but it is also a concrete one. How do we—materially—get people out of cages? One direct way is through getting people more resources from the state, something the disability community has known and organized around for a long time. The difference between reformist and abolitionist change isn’t the degree of the change, but whether it truly moves us toward a world without prisons. Abolitionists need to be organizing around public benefits, because benefits law will always either increase or decrease the carceral net.
The carceral state is a steamroller. Staying out of its way helps us, but it will continue to run over people until it is stopped. Abolitionists have to engage with the state because it will continue to ensnare people in its carceral net until we dismantle it. It is great for communities to develop harm-reducing practices that don’t involve the state; those may well save a few folks from being flattened. But they won’t stop the machine. Because incarceration and benefits are tied so closely together, anyone concerned with mass incarceration should also be in the fight to protect (and increase) public benefits.
Image: Shivansh Sharma / Unsplash
