Really Not Prepared: More on Criminal Justice & Autism
The criminal justice system is not prepared to deal with individuals with developmental disabilities.
Sky Walker and of Henry Cozad are both young men who have been charged with killing someone this year. Walker and Cozad both have an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Another young man, Chris Bello, has been accused of as many as 100 instances of molestation of a 5-year-old child, as reported on the April 13th Disaboom blog. Chris has been in prison (often solitary confinement) for over a year and could face 25 years in a state prison. He has an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and has been spending his time "alone in his jail cell with a pile of coloring books." The charges against Chris all stem from "'a statement by a 5 year old in school, who described being molested in the bathtub,'" according to his mother, Judith Bello. Disaboom describes the difficulties Chris has faced in the judicial process, from making statements to the police to appearing before a judge.
The criminal justice system is just not able to handle cases involving individuals with developmental disabilities. Certainly, the prison system is not able to.
So where do we start?
First thing that comes to mind is simple and basic: Education, education, education. When I once spoke to a criminal justice professor on my college campus and asked him if autism is a topic covered in his classes, he talked about abnormal psychology and deviant behavior, and juvenile courts if an individual is younger. And then he added that it's just not a topic that is really covered. He had to teach a class so that conversation ended there but this particular issue has been on my mind a lot ever since.
There's been more than a few initiatives to train police officers and other first responders to assist individuals on the spectrum; there've also been more than a few tragic stories when excessive force was used. There need to be the same kind of initiatives and training for those within the criminal justice system so that the needs of individuals with developmental disabilities can be adequately addressed. In the of Chris Bello, it's suggested that he had a number of challenges in understanding the verbal directions and requests given to him by the police, the legal system, the lawyers, the judges, and that he may well have made statements that he was not aware he was making. Like mental health issues, developmental disabilities need to be recognized and addressed, if justice is truly going to be served.
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