ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book uses the term "intellectual disability" rather than "learning disability" in the knowledge that within the coming decade another more "correct" term will be coined. It also discusses that "intellectual disability" will come to feel as anachronistic and offensive as mental handicap, spastic and idiot have come to sound to modern ears. The book explores people with intellectual disabilities who have perpetrated acts of abuse, or are at risk of doing so. Prevalence studies of forensic disability patients in prison are complicated by diagnostic variations and inconsistencies in how the Criminal Justice System assesses and records evidence of disability. Forensic disability therapy has been born, nurtured and developed against the odds, being a discipline that seeks to work with patients who too many clinicians regard as untreatable on two unalterable counts–their disability and their forensic history.
