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…]
Unsurprisingly, research shows that people who have deviant sexual preferences are more likely to commit sexual offences, so it makes sense that if we can more accurately identify deviant sexual preferences, we will be able to reduce crimes of this nature. Phallometry (also known as penile plethysmography or phallometric assessment) involves placing a device around [read the full story…]
Studies show that as many as 90% of prisoners have some kind of mental health issue and admissions to psychiatric hospital are also common (10% of male and 30% of female prisoners). This updated briefing paper from the Centre for Mental Health examines the provision of mental health care for adults in the criminal justice [read the full story…]
There continues to be some debate about the numbers of people with learning disabilities in UK prisons, partly due to the lack of consensus on definitions of learning disability in studies and different approaches to establishing the boundaries between learning difficulty, borderline learning disability and learning disability. The Bradley report recommended amongst its key recommendations [read the full story…]
The Adapted Sex Offender treatment Programme (ASOTP) was piloted in a secure learning disability service. This study set out to evaluate its effectiveness and respond to the criticisms and concerns of conventional closed format programmes. The researchers set out to gather the views of a variety of stakeholders (purchasers, clients, clinicians, group facilitators and clients’ [read the full story…]
