Disability and the Queensland Criminal Justice System
Thomson Reuters 2012
Melisa had an incredible impact upon me. In the early days of developing the Disability Law Project, which unbeknown to me at the time was Australia’s first dedicated criminal law service for disabled people, I had this real hunch that people with disabilities for a raft of reasons, some explored in this book, were seriously predisposed to the rough edge of the criminal justice system, purely because of their disability. I had just completed working in the Drug Court of Queensland Pilot and became increasingly aware of the problematic nature of entry into this diversion program if you had a disability, or more specifically a disability that may compromise your ability to comply with the Intensive Drug Rehabilitation Order. So, often I would hear of these ill-fated applications that came to the court from people with a mental illness, intellectual disability or an acquired brain injury that were denied access. It puzzled me on a number of levels, because if they were the most vulnerable and marginalised in the system, despite their inaccessibility to the Drug Court regime which bordered on discrimination, what opportunities did this cohort have to get out of the system, and how did they get there in the first place……
