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What Happens to Autistic People in Prison?

What happens to autistic people in prison? We spoke with Clare Hughes, the Criminal Justice Coordinator for the United Kingdom’s National Autistic Society, about the unique experiences of and considerations for incarcerated autistic people. Clare has been leading on the NAS’s work expanding its accreditation programme to police forces, prisons, and probation services. Note that while some discussed issues are UK-specific, many can be generalized. Photo © Dave Nakayama/Creative Commons license [image: Prison cell bars, with the background cell itself slightly out of focus.] Clare Hughes: We don’t know how many autistic people there are in prison in the UK: information about people diagnosed with autism isn’t collected routinely for the general population, let alone for prisoners, and many will be undiagnosed. HM Young Offender Institution (YOI) and Prison at Feltham diagnose young people in the prison, if they are there long enough. In February 2016, they identified that 4.5% of…

Sam, at Nineteen: On Transitions and Autistic School-Leavers

Charlotte Moore www.ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk Charlotte Moore is an author, journalist and Parent Patron of Ambitious about Autism. Here she writes about her hopes and fears for her son Sam as he moves on from school and in to adulthood. We hope readers will share their own experiences and opinions about this transition period. My son Sam left school in July 2011. Sam has autism with learning difficulties. At 19, he has reached the age at which the government relinquishes responsibility for the education of people like him. I hope I won’t come to look back wistfully at Sam’s school years as a lost golden age. I hope that the home-based timetable I’m in the process of constructing will serve his needs. But I’m daunted to discover how much is down to me. For a long, long time — almost as long as he can remember — Sam has been in a…