In Jail, with Autism?

“Autistic spectrum disorder in the Juvenile Justice setting” is the title of a paper presented by Teresa D. Flower of the School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University in Australia. In her presentation, Flower notes that autism appears to be “under-diagnosed” in the juvenile justice setting; as she notes in her abstract of her presentation:

Some of these young people have been seen by mental health services in the past but often the anti-social behaviour dominates the nature of the contact and the correct diagnosis is missed. Many young people entering the juvenile justice system have a background of residential care and involvement of child protection; for these young people there is often no parent informant to provide a reliable developmental history which complicates the diagnostic process. Many of these young people also fail to meet strict diagnostic criteria, falling within the ‘Not otherwise specified’ range.

On entry to the criminal justice system these young people are vulnerable; in custodial settings they are likely to be the victims of assaults and bullying by other clients. Targeted criminal justice interventions are often ineffective for different reasons; for example, group based treatment programmes may rely on the development of empathy for success, intervention orders are an ineffective way of managing obsessional behaviour. There are also questions relating to criminal responsibility concerning the absence of an ability to develop theory of mind.

I would be curious to know more about those involved in Flower’s study. Anti-social behavior, obsessional behavior, and a lack of empathy and theory of mind are often noted as characteristics of autism, but the first two characteristics are not found in autistic individuals only, of course.

Professor Flower presented her paper in a Symposium on Juvenile Justice at the 17th World Congress of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions on September 12th, 2006.