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ndrew Beasley was quickly losing his cool. It was October 2015, and he was about two years into his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix in New Jersey.Beasley, then 32, had left his MP3 player on a charging station in the facility’s computer room, but when he went to retrieve it, it was gone. He thought he knew who had it and frantically started to look for the man.
“I’m forgetting politics. I’m forgetting everything. I’m just looking for my MP3 player,” says Beasley, who had been diagnosed with autism two years earlier.
In the heat of the moment, he had also forgotten the man’s name. When Beasley spotted him, he shouted, “Yo, yo!” and when the man ignored him, he grabbed the shoulder of the man’s jacket. The man spun around and snatched Beasley up by his coat collar. A screaming match ensued.
“Did you see my MP3 player?” Beasley demanded.
The other man denied any knowledge of the device’s whereabouts, shoved Beasley away and stormed off. Beasley found a quiet place to cool down — but it was not long before the man found Beasley again. “He walks up to me,” Beasley recalls. “I’m sitting on the floor; he crouches down. He just starts, you know, speed-bag punching my ribs. I think it was about 14 hits.”
Two months later, another inmate attacked Beasley after he refused to switch beds — the man did not want to sleep near Beasley and wanted him to move farther away.
Violence is hardly rare in prison: About one in five men in the U.S. prison population is assaulted by another inmate or by prison staff every six months, according to a 2009 study. But prison holds particular dangers for people with autism, who are prone to anxiety, inflexible thinking and sudden outbursts — traits likely to provoke the ire of others. For those with sensory sensitivities, the crowded, noisy spaces and bright lights of prison can exacerbate their anxiety and other traits. And many autistic inmates are oblivious to social cues that are critical to peacefully navigating the prison environment.
As a result, they are apt to get into fights or become the target of bullies who see them as reactive or gullible. “People with autism don’t get unwritten rules,” says Glynis Murphy, a clinical psychologist at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. “They don’t get them when they’re out in the community, and they don’t get them when they’re in prison.”
Compounding the problems autistic people face behind bars is the fact that prisons tend to be ill-equipped to accommodate inmates on the spectrum. Most facilities are chronically short of mental health professionals, who tend to prioritize schizophrenia and other conditions that present a greater security risk than autism does. And corrections staff are rarely trained to recognize and appropriately interact with autistic people. Prison officials sometimes see them as troublemakers and mistakenly blame them for altercations, Murphy says.
Two weeks after the second attack on Beasley, for example, the prison lieutenant called Beasley into his office — for the 26th time since his arrival at Fort Dix. “You know what?” Beasley recalls the lieutenant saying. “There’s something wrong with you.” The lieutenant placed Beasley in a special housing unit popularly referred to as ‘the hole.’ For 96 days, he was confined to a 6-by-8-foot cell with two other inmates. As the third man in a two-bunk cell, Beasley had to sleep on a razor-thin mattress on the floor, his head 2 feet from a shared toilet. “I’d be up at night staring at the brick walls,” he says. “It was really disturbing, psychologically.”
Spectrum contacted two prisons where Beasley was held. Fort Dix declined to comment. The second facility, the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury in Connecticut, redirected Spectrum to the Northeast Regional Office of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which did not respond to requests for comment.
There is no official count of autistic prisoners in the United States or any other country, but studies suggest they are plentiful. Survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics show that in 2011 and 2012, 30 percent of women and 19 percent of men in U.S. state and federal prisons had a ‘cognitive disability,’ a category that includes autism. A 2012 study of 431 male prisoners in the U.S. found an autism prevalence of 4.4 percent, about double the prevalence in the general population. Many other prisoners on the spectrum may go undiagnosed.
Autism itself is not associated with crime, but it is linked to factors, such as unemployment and homelessness, that research shows increase a person’s chances of entering the criminal justice system, often repeatedly. The result is a large population of people at high risk of abuse behind bars. “There’s a really basic issue of whether prison works for people with autism,” Murphy says. “I’m not a great believer in prisons anyway, but I think they’re even less appropriate for people with autism.”