Research is increasingly revealing how little neurodiversity is understood in the context of the criminal justice system. One example, cited by Jon Robins, in this week’s NLJ, is a recent report that found as many as one in four prisoners in Britain may have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
Other reports have produced equally startling results. A major study by the three criminal justice inspectorates last year estimated as many as half of all prisoners could be classed as neurodivergent. It also suggested nearly one in eight prisoners have a history of traumatic brain injury.
Robins runs through some historic scandals and present-day miscarriages of justice, in his NLJ column, not least the case of Oliver Campbell, a man with severe learning disabilities as a result of brain injury as a baby, who ‘was convicted almost solely on the strength of a nonsensical confession made in the absence of his duty solicitor’. See p7.
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