‘Subjects to be dealt with’: Disability, class, and carceral power in early 20th-century Britain

In this article, I will examine the category ‘subject to be dealt with’, which was established by the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Designed to demonstrate the legislation's respect for individual liberty, the boundaries of the category established the grounds on which authorities had the responsibility to act upon those deemed to be ‘mentally defective’. In essence, ‘subject to be dealt with’ became the supposedly rational, measured qualifying category through which the condemnation of ‘defect’ could be operationalized. In both its actual implementation and the realm of possibilities it entailed, the category of ‘subject to be dealt with’ facilitated a range of discourses and practices. It powerfully linked disability and the imperatives of segregation and confinement, a logic that was reinforced even by those critiquing the Mental Deficiency Act, at both its inception and its demise. As a category ‘subject to be dealt with’ at once intensively targeted carceral power on disability, while also working to more deeply ideologically enmesh cognitive and class deviance, naturalizing the broader carceral or institutional archipelago – of asylums, workhouses, special schools, prisons, and so on – to which disabled, poor, and racialized people have been subject.