Mental Health courts were established in the USA in the 1990s, and were designed to help offenders with a mental health diagnosis who might end up in prison to have access to long-term community-based treatment. Mental health courts were piloted in England in 2009 to ensure that a defendant’s mental health or learning disability was [read the full story…]
Self-esteem is a concept well used in psychology to describe how a person evaluates their own worth and can be viewed positively and negatively. In this quantitative study, the researcher was interested in how prevalent low self-esteem was in a population of people with learning disabilities in a forensic service. She used an adapted version [read the full story…]
The government have published their new alcohol strategy for the United Kingdom. The last few years has seen a fall in the number of alcohol-related deaths in many other countries, but the UK has bucked this trend and has seen a rise in deaths from liver disease and an increase in hospital admissions related to [read the full story…]
In 2008, the Prison Reform Trust carried out work on the issues facing people with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system, resulting in the ‘No One Knows’ report which suggested they faced ‘personal, systemic and routine’ discrimination from the point of arrest through to release from prison. One key finding was that less than [read the full story…]
The public perception of mental health and violent behaviour has often been influenced by poor media coverage and a focus on specific crimes committed by people with psychosis. There’s a nice summary of work in this area on the Mind website, which includes a number of enlightening stats, including this one: The fear of random [read the full story…]
The researchers in this UK study set out to look at empathy in sex offenders with learning disabilities, with a view to exploring the differences between this group and non offenders with learning disabilities. They used specific measures of the components of empathy. They compared the scores of 21 sex-offenders and 21 non-offenders with learning [read the full story…]
This paper describes a case study of a young man with Asperger syndrome who set a fire in his home. The authors point out that offences may be committed by people with autistic spectrum disorders because of deficits in social skills, co-morbid mental health problems or abuse of drugs and alcohol. There may also be [read the full story…]
Last week we posted about a study in the Netherlands which called for more cross sector collaboration to tackle the issue of substance misuse , but there is little in the literature about possible links between the prevalence of substance abuse and links to offending behaviour among people with learning disabilities. The authors of this [read the full story…]
The Department of Health have published their proposed next steps to develop services for offenders with severe personality disorders in the NHS and Criminal Justice System. This follows a consultation that ran from Feb-May this year. In short, this work seeks to ensure that: the personality disordered offender population is a shared responsibility of the [read the full story…]
There continue to be difficulties in agreeing on the numbers of people with learning disabilities in the offender population. Estimates range from 2% to 10%. The author of this review set out to look at recent research in the field which includes work on prevalence, developments in appropriate assessments and investigations into the effectiveness of [read the full story…]
