Symposium Overview - The Black Mentally Retarded Offender (From Black Mentally Retarded Offender - A Holistic Approach to Prevention and Habilitation, P 17-24, 1982, Aminifu R Harvey and Terry L Carr - ed. - See NCJ-92487)

• NCJ Number: 92489
• Author(s): A Pollard
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 9 pages
• Corporate Author: United Church of Christ
• Sale Source: United Church of Christ
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Mild mental retardation due largely to debilitating environmental influences renders a person vulnerable to the adoption of deviant behavior and is disproportionately experienced by blacks; consequently, there is a high percentage of blacks in prison; there are a number of promising rehabilitative programs that target these offenders.

Abstract

Children raised in urban ghettos or impoverished rural areas are more likely to be diagnosed as mentally retarded than are children from middle-class suburban neighborhoods. One reason is the generally deprived intellectual environment is which such children have been nurtured, combined with numerous other problems linked with poverty: poor nutrition, unhealthy living conditions, poor child care, low cognitive stimulation, inadequate educational programs, and related aspects of deprivation. Because of retarded persons' inability to compete successfully in normative society, they are susceptible to the adoption of deviant survival behaviors. Many States are developing special programs to better serve this population. They include training the police to recognize and deal appropriately with retarded persons, conducting routine daily checks of the jail population to identify mentally retarded inmates so as to divert them to appropriate environments and services, residential behavior modification programs, and probation and parole programs specially designed for the retarded offender. The trend in programing for the retarded offender is toward prescriptive programing that focuses on each person's unique needs.