Criminal Justice System: Autism

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, a young Japanese boy by the name of Naoki Higashida wrote a book entitled The Reason I Jump. It should be basic reading for anybody in public service who has to deal with other members of the public. It is just 198 pages long and is set out in a question and answer format. There are just 58 questions, each question no more than 10 words long, with the answer about 100 to 150 words long. Question 21 in the book is relevant to today’s debate. The question which some people ask him as an autistic person is:

“Why don’t you do what you’re told to straight away?”.

He answers:

“There are times when I can’t do what I want to, or what I have to. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I just can’t get it all together, somehow. Even performing one straightforward task, I can’t get started as smoothly as you can. Here’s how I have to go about things.

1. I think about what I’m going to do.

2. I visualise how I’m going to do it.

3. I encourage myself to get going.

How smoothly I can do the job depends on how smoothly the process goes.

There are times when I can’t act, even though I really, badly want to. This is when my body is beyond my control”.

That one sentence jumps off the page for me:

“How smoothly I can do the job depends on how smoothly the process goes”.

Just think of that sentence, and how easy it would be for the most basic and simple encounter between a police officer and an autistic person not to go smoothly, and to get out of hand.

The plain truth is that people with autism have no more desire to commit a crime than any of us. But what may start as an innocent inquiry—an encounter with a police officer—could lead to a crime being committed. A situation could escalate simply because the police, in the main, have no idea about, and lack sufficient training in dealing with, people with autism.

People with autism communicate in a way that is not familiar to most of us. The command of spoken language in a person with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome does not necessarily indicate their true level of understanding or social awareness. The wider implications of a situation may not be apparent to a person with autism, and they may not understand the kind of information they need to give in response to questioning. People with autism are also often unaware of the consequences of their actions or the effect their behaviour will have on other people, because they do not link cause and effect.

Put yourselves in this position, my Lords, and imagine that you are autistic and for one reason or another enter into a confrontational situation with a police officer. Imagine the police officer telling you to do something. They, rightly, expect you to respond immediately. And then remember that young man’s question 21:

“Why don’t you do what you’re told to straight away?”

And his answer:

“There are times when I can’t do what I want to, or what I have to. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I just can’t get it all together, somehow”.

People with autism are often very single-minded about their interests, and can be unaware of the effect that their actions could have on others, or that those actions could lead to them putting themselves or others in danger, or committing a crime. A person with autism, when faced with a situation such as arrest, or following an incident, may have difficulties in managing their emotional reaction. The response of the criminal justice system to this is crucial. But without appropriate training in autism, the situation could escalate, leading to inappropriate sanctions being taken against a person with autism.

The refreshed autism strategy, Think Autism, which the Government published last April, commits the Home Office to working with the College of Policing to update the mental health training for new officers, and to look at the feasibility of an autism marker being used on the police national computer, so that police officers can identify whether someone has autism, and make appropriate adjustments. That point was well made by my noble friend Lady Uddin, who we congratulate on securing this debate. The strategy was signed off by both the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. If there were a marker on the police national computer, it could also be seen by other criminal justice system professionals, including prison and probation staff. So may I ask the Minister what progress has been made in this area, and what processes exist to roll out autism training to all police officers and prison staff, not just to new recruits?

Contact with the criminal justice system will have a significant impact on a person’s life. This is no less true of a person with autism. Such contact may also be a sign that their existing care and support is no longer working. For some people with autism, the situation may have been compounded over recent years by their no longer being eligible for support as a result of changing criteria—or perhaps they never qualified for support in the first place.

I share the disappointment of the National Autistic Society—here I must declare an interest as a vice-president of that organisation—that the revised adult autism strategy failed to highlight the need to reassess a person’s needs when they enter or leave the criminal justice system. So I ask the Minister: what steps are the Government taking to ensure that people with autism in prisons are identified and given appropriate support? I must stress that they need to be properly assessed to ensure that support will be there for their journey out of prison and back into the community.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I believe that training plays a key part in trying to overcome some of these problems. The questions and answers in the small book that I have spoken about should be essential reading for everybody working in the public sector. It would make a difference in solving some of these problems.