There is an interesting news editorial/article that can be found by CLICKING HERE that explore the increased ratio of learning disabled individuals in US prisons and the systems failure to deal with this group effectively.
The article and the comments posted seem to get overly influenced by IQ scores themselves and push towards a if you have an IQ below 70 you are not bright enough to do anything else than commit crimes kind of mindset. There is a lot wrong with this of course as we know low FSIQ's is reflective of MR/ID/MID not LD. But if we ignore all that, the article in itself is of interest in that it really does force us to think about cognitive deficits outside of the education system.
It is pretty easy to suppose that individuals with executive functioning based LD's would be more likely to end up in prison than their peers. Difficulties with generalizing rules and effective problem solving strategies, impulsive patterns of responding, ineffective strategies to make decisions between effective vs. non-effective responses, inability to set shift away from emotionally charged responses. These are really a blueprint to poor responses to life stresses.
I wonder if there is a role for the psychoeducational consultant in the criminal justice system or if this is the place for forensic psychology. Competency to stand trial is certainly in the forensics realm, but I think this is something different. It also would have to do with training. We know that typically LD based individuals have difficulty generalizing learned strategies. My guess is that the success of prison based remediations is dramatically lower in LD groups than controls. There could very likely be a socially and individually based benefit of having LD specialists (both assessment and strategy) in prisons.
