Conferences and Symposiums organised by Leanne Dowse
Disability at the Margins: Vulnerability, Empowerment and the Criminal Law, University of Wollong... more Disability at the Margins: Vulnerability, Empowerment and the Criminal Law, University of Wollongong, 27 November 2013, hosted by Legal Intersections Research Centre (organised with Stuart Thomas)
Papers by Leanne Dowse
Prisoners with an intellectual disability (ID) are an over-represented group in custody, with stu... more Prisoners with an intellectual disability (ID) are an over-represented group in custody, with studies indicating this group is more likely to reoffend and be reincarcerated than the general prison population. While prisoners with ID share many of the same risk factors for recidivism as the general prison population, the lack of adequate disability support has been argued to be an additional key driver of recidivism for this group. This study aims to investigate reincarceration and factors associated with reincarceration after a first adult custody episode, including the impact of provision of general and specialist disability supports. The study used linked disability support services and custody data to identify a cohort of 1,129 prisoners with ID who were released from a first adult custodial episode in New South Wales (NSW) between 2005 and 2015. Over the follow-up period, the linked custody data showed that 72% (813) of those identified with an ID and released from a first adult custodial episode returned to prison, of which 76% (617) received no post-release disability support. This study found that 27% (308) of the study cohort had received a disability support service post-release from adult custody. Receipt of disability support was associated with a lower risk of reincarceration, while younger age and shorter duration of the custodial episode were associated with higher risk of reincarceration. The potential for disability support to lower risk of reincarceration highlights the importance of funding programmes that connect prisoners with ID to appropriate post-release disability supports.
Child & Youth Services, Oct 20, 2022
Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, Apr 6, 2021
BackgroundStudies of the representation of people with intellectual disability (ID) in custody re... more BackgroundStudies of the representation of people with intellectual disability (ID) in custody report widely inconsistent findings that reflect variation in how ID is defined and the methods employed for identification. Using linked administrative data may be of utility in studies of the representation of people with ID in custody. However, this approach requires an understanding of the purpose of and factors influencing identification in disparate administrative datasets.MethodsThis study uses linked administrative data encompassing disability, health and corrections data for the year 2014 to estimate the prevalence of ID in adult custody and explore how ID representation within administrative data impacts prevalence estimates and what patterns of identification reveal about support service access for this group.ResultsThis study finds that 4.3% of the New South Wales adult custody population had an identified ID. Prisoners with ID were younger, more likely to have had a previous custodial episode and more likely to be Indigenous than the general prison population. Identification of ID across linked administrative datasets is uneven, which, if used in isolation, would result in variation in prevalence estimates according to source data.ConclusionsThe utilisation of linkage data from a broad range of health and support services including custody offers a comprehensive identification methodology. Inconsistency in the identification of ID across datasets indicates a potential disjuncture between prisoners with ID and support services, which may have relevance for efforts to reduce reincarceration of those in this population.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2023
The material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter is starkly evident in the high rate... more The material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter is starkly evident in the high rates of people with disability who are criminalized or imprisoned in carceral institutions across the globe-the vast majority of whom are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Human Rights Watch, 2009, 2020). The distinctive political, material and epistemic circumstances driving the growth in criminalization and incarceration for this group expose the shortcomings of a universalist understanding of justice. This chapter focuses on the epistemic and political foundations needed to reimagine justice for criminalized or incarcerated people with disability in settler-colonial contexts, many of whom are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. By foregrounding the primacy of coloniality in the creation and maintenance of the carceral state, we contend that justice for criminalized or incarcerated people with disability in settler-colonial contexts is contingent upon the progression of an inclusive decolonial abolition. Following disability justice activists and movements, we use 'disability' as an umbrella term for the experience of people who have a range of physical, cognitive, and psychological impairments. While acknowledging the specificity of the struggles for justice of Indigenous people and people of colour, where appropriate, we use the terms 'race' and 'racialized peoples' to include Black, Indigenous and people of colour. We further acknowledge the particularities of Black, Indigenous, peoples of colour, and disabled peoples' respective struggles for liberation and self-determination. Our analysis fundamentally aligns with the call by Chickasaw Nation anti-colonial scholar Jodi Byrd (2019) to think through the multiple possibilities of solidarity and resistance between members of these various and overlapping groups in a manner that foregrounds the realities that Indigenous peoples' lands "became the grounds for others' oppressions" (p. 213). Despite its pervasiveness in settler-colonial carceral regimes, sustained discussions of the nexus between race and disability continue to be largely missing from the decolonial and abolitionist scholarship. One consequence of this absence is that the potential implications of such inquiry for progressing the liberatory aspirations of decolonization and abolition as mutually constitutive projects remain underdeveloped. In pursuing the development of intellectual and praxis interventions that seek to dismantle and transform colonial carceral regimes, abolitionist scholars and activists urge us to think through the interconnections between all forms of domination and oppression (Davis et al., 2022; Matsuda, 1999). Indigenous and decolonial scholars This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
British Journal of Psychiatry Open, Feb 27, 2023
Background Prisoners with an intellectual disability are overrepresented in custody and more like... more Background Prisoners with an intellectual disability are overrepresented in custody and more likely to reoffend and be reincarcerated compared with the general prison population. Although prisoners with intellectual disability have many of the same risk factors for recidivism as the general prison population, the high rates of mental illness experienced by this group are key drivers of recidivism. Aims We aimed to assess the impact of provision of post-release disability and community mental health support on rates of reincarceration in a cohort with identified intellectual disability and serious mental illness diagnosis. Method We conducted a historical cohort study using linked administrative data-sets, including data on hospital admissions, community mental health, disability support and corrections custody in New South Wales, Australia (n = 484). To assess the time to return to adult custody, we used survival analysis on multiple failure-time data. Results Over the median follow-up period of 7.4 years, 73.7% (357) received community mental health support, 19.8% (96) received disability support and 18.6% (85) received a combination of supports during a post-release period from prison. Lower hazards of reincarceration in a post-release period were associated with receipt of community mental health support (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.58, CI 0.49-0.69, P < 0.001), or a combination of community mental health and disability support (HR = 0.46, CI 0.34-0.61, P < 0.001). Conclusions High rates of reincarceration for prisoners with intellectual disability and history of serious mental illness may be modifiable by provision of appropriate mental health and disability supports.
Incarceration, Jul 1, 2022
There is a growing body of research in Australia and internationally focused on ‘care-criminalisa... more There is a growing body of research in Australia and internationally focused on ‘care-criminalisation’: the criminal justice system involvement of young people in out-of-home care. Residential care – a model of out-of-home care where groups of children and young people live with paid staff – has been identified as a specific site of criminalisation for those who live there, in particular young people with cognitive disability and complex support needs. This raises significant human rights concerns and the need for greater systemic scrutiny. This article aims to make a contribution by focusing specifically on the institutional arrangements and characterisations that criminalise young people with cognitive disability in residential care through interrogating the official administrative records of two young people with cognitive disability who spent time in residential care and had contact with the criminal justice system as teenagers. Analysing case studies compiled from these records illustrates the ways that criminal justice intervention becomes justified and normalised for young people with cognitive disability in residential care. We critique the ways that institutional mechanisms and narratives serve to construct, coerce and constrain young people with cognitive disability in residential care. The specific forms of surveillance and control they are subjected to mean that their designation of ‘at risk’ almost routinely transmutes to ‘a risk’ to others, to themselves and to property and in the process their vulnerability and need for care and protection becomes instead a mechanism of criminalisation. Often disability becomes erased or at least overshadowed in administrative records, with care-specific and disability-related behaviour reinscribed as offending behaviour. Particularly stark in this analysis is the institutional and interpersonal violence that accompanies such criminalisation and the pervasive nature of this violence in the lives of young people with cognitive disability in residential care settings: violence they are subjected to by those responsible for their care and safety and violence as their response to the regulation of their circumstances – against property and staff and towards themselves.
Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 2019
Advances in police theory and practice, May 7, 2013
Police are at the frontline in attending crises and offending situations and events with persons ... more Police are at the frontline in attending crises and offending situations and events with persons with mental disorders. This though is too narrow a way of conceptualizing this aspect of policing. By far the majority of people with mental impairment have more than one disorder or disability. They are likely to have multiple and compounding disorders, impairment and disadvantages; this is what has been termed ‘complex needs’ by many in the field. We discuss the substantial expectations on police in handling situations with people who experience ‘complex needs’ using case studies from a dataset including over 2,700 persons in the New South Wales (NSW) criminal justice system whose criminal justice and human agency lifecourse data has been linked and merged. Many government agencies have developed difficult to traverse boundaries to working with or supporting persons experiencing multiple impairments, leaving it to the police to manage not just the criminal justice and community safety aspects of this group, but also their social and personal needs.
Journal of Educational Administration and History
Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, Oct 19, 2021
Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 2019
Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2019
This paper reports on the development of the Our Ways to Planning framework. The framework is int... more This paper reports on the development of the Our Ways to Planning framework. The framework is intended as a guide for Australian organisations to work in safe and culturally appropriate ways to assist and enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability to make plans about their physical and mental health, wellbeing and future. The Our Ways to Planning framework is based on data collected via community-led research undertaken with Aboriginal people with disability and their family members and workers from five communities in New South Wales. Community mapping, an arts-based research method, was used to learn about the experiences of Aboriginal people with disability and their families regarding planning and access to services. Using iterative, thematic analysis, the research team identified core themes and concepts around which to structure the framework. The framework identifies three 'bridges' to organisational readiness for planning: knowledge, understa...
There is a lack of empirical research in Australia examining the lifecourse institutional costs a... more There is a lack of empirical research in Australia examining the lifecourse institutional costs associated with vulnerable people who are homeless. The study presented here has developed pathway costings using the Mental Health and Cognitive Disability in the Criminal Justice System (MHDCD) Dataset that contains data on lifelong interventions and interactions with all criminal justice and some human services agencies that are available for a cohort of 2,731 people who have been in prison in NSW and whose MHDCD diagnoses are known. This study’s purpose is to contribute to understanding the real costs associated with this group’s homelessness and criminal justice involvement and alternative policy and program responses. Merging data across criminal justice sub-systems and with relevant human services is a useful way to provide a broad, dynamic understanding of the trans-criminal justice and human service involvement of persons with complex needs. This study was supported by the Austra...
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Conferences and Symposiums organised by Leanne Dowse
Papers by Leanne Dowse
Abstract:
We take as our point of intervention one category of violence which sits outside the forms of violence against women which are both currently prohibited by criminal law and the focus of violence against women campaigns: non-consensual medical interventions (or, as we refer to it, ‘lawful medical violence’). By drawing on critical disability studies, particularly feminist disability theory, we argue that lawful medical violence has been rendered socially and legally permissible because of the medicalisation of disabled women’s bodies and the related pathologisation of their behaviour and life circumstances. These processes sit at the intersection of gender and disability, drawing on gendered social norms of ability and sexuality to construct women with disability as genderless and dehumanised, and in turn depoliticising non-consensual medical interventions in these women’s bodies by reconstituting them as therapeutic and benevolent. In order to recognise and contest lawful medical violence as violence against women, mainstream feminist scholars and activists might consider turning to different legal, institutional and spatial sites of violence and challenging deeply embedded divisions and foundational concepts in law related to mental capacity.
A Submission to the Senate Inquiry on the Indefinite Detention of People with Cognitive and Psychiatric Impairment
Prepared by:
FIRST PEOPLES DISABILITY JUSTICE CONSORTIUM
An alliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations, disability, justice and legal researchers, Universities and Research Institutes.
An initiative of First Peoples Disability Network (Australia), its strategic partners and supports.
April 2016