Book Review of Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses,

Abstract

This multidisciplinary edited collection provides a range of perspectives on how the criminal justice system currently responds to individuals living with acquired brain injury and/or traumatic brain injury or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The three editors are academics at Monash University with respective backgrounds in law, social work and criminology and they have co-authored the first and final chapters of the collection as well as two other chapters (one of those co-authored with Rebecca Bunn). The editors have assembled contributors from the United States, England, South Africa and Australia, many of them academics with backgrounds in law, psychiatry, psychology, sociology and neuroscience. The collection developed out of the editors’ empirical research funded by the Office of the Public Advocate in Victoria, and many of the authors attended a meeting at the Monash campus in Prato, Italy to discuss their contributions. That background to the book has obviously contributed to a sense of overall cohesion which is sometimes lacking in edited collections. This collection deals with a little-explored area of the criminal justice system, and that in itself is commendable. However, it is worthwhile setting out some concerns with the way in which the topic is framed. The editors use the term ‘neurodisability’ in its broadest sense to include ‘acquired brain injury (ABI) and/or traumatic brain injury (TBI), autism, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), and intellectual disability’. The risk of using such a broad term that encompasses so many conditions is that nuance can be lost. Lumping so many diverse conditions under an umbrella term also brings with it the danger of unintentional ‘othering’ of persons with disabilities. I baulked, for example, at one reference to people with Williams syndrome being described as ‘the Golden Retrievers of humanity’ (p. 28). Comparing persons with disabilities to animals, even if well-intentioned, undercuts attempts to ensure ‘the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity’. It is also possible that a broad term such as neurodisability might give rise to questionable assumptions about the association between the conditions listed and criminal behaviour. The editors, for example, write, without any footnote references, that ‘ABI, TBI, FASD and ID and other forms of disability are becoming increasingly recognised as major contributors to criminal behaviours’ (emphasis added, p. 13). Such a generalisation risks conflating correlation with causation, and more care could have been taken in this regard. Some of the authors do refer to the complexities associated with the diagnoses of ABI, TBI and FASD, which is to be expected, but