Vanessa Ramos of Disability Rights California and the All People’s Health Collective joins podcast co-host Susan Li to discuss how services in California are failing to provide people with the care and supports they need and warehousing people in cruel, isolating, and coercive locked facilities instead—sometimes for years.

Vanessa looks at the lessons that can be learned from the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment system and offers a vision of organized care that holistically addresses what people actually need—a spectrum of services, resources, housing, community, family, creativity, and more—to be healthy and well.

Vanessa Ramos and Lucina Kayee talk through the often missing stories of homelessness, substance use, and how harm reduction is imagined.

 Sarah Wattar, a global teacher and an investigator with Civil Rights Corps, talks about her work fighting the policing, incarceration, and court systems and contrasts it with how intervention is understood in other countries, pointing to the ways families, and the lives of people within them, have been defined, protected, and disrupted in the U.S. She and the host also reflect on how SB 258 is yet another way we would allow policing and regulation into our family spaces.

In this episode, Susan (CRC) and Carolina (DRC) discuss what carceral feminism is and how it showed up in SB 258. They explore how the pervasive impulse to punish, culturally and criminally, in the name of protecting women has burned people out and turned most away from engaging in conversations about the full range of sexual experiences, from miscommunication to regret to violence

Kecia Weller, woman with lived experience of I/DD and a national sexual violence educator, shares her fight against California’s SB 258 and the nonprofits and policymakers who negotiated deals without her.

In conversation with UC Irvine Professor Aaron Bornstein about recent findings on the damage caused by psychiatric holds and how the outcomes are so similar to mass incarceration.