Autistic people are 38 percent less likely to be proceeded against, 40 percent less likely to be charged and 44 percent less likely to be convicted following a police interaction than their non-autistic peers in the island nation of New Zealand. Autistic people are incarcerated at a slightly higher rate than non-autistic people, though.
The data include 1,197 people with autism and 147,879 without autism who had a police interaction when they were between 17 and 25 years old. The study, published in Autism in December, claims to be the first to examine pathways through a criminal justice system for a national sample of young adults with or without autism.
A prior study of 431 male prisoners in the U.S., by contrast, found that 4.4 percent of them had autism, which is double the prevalence in the general population. Spectrum has previously covered the challenges of being incarcerated and autistic.
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