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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of adults with intellectual disabilities supported by a Community Forensic Learning Disability Team (CFT) and interventions delivered. It discusses the clinical implications of these and examines outcomes such as recidivism. Design/methodology/approach A retrospective case note review of all 70 service users open to the CFT during June 2013 was carried out, using a structured service evaluation tool. Findings The majority of service users (74.3 per cent) had a mild intellectual disability. Multiple mental health and/or physical health diagnoses were common, and 28 per cent had problematic drug or alcohol abuse. Almost half of service users had been victims of physical or sexual abuse, or neglect. Sexual offences were the most common index offence, followed by assault and fire-setting. A wide range of multi-disciplinary interventions were delivered within the Community Forensic Team. Following CFT involvement there was an increase in service users living in supported living in the community and a decrease in people in secure or out of area placements. Over half of service users engaged in no further offending behaviour since their referral, and those who did offend generally showed a decrease in the severity of offending behaviours. There was a large decrease in the number of convictions received. Practical implications The study shows the benefits of a multi-disciplinary Community Forensic Team for offenders with intellectual disabilities in terms of reduced recidivism and range of interventions delivered. It highlights the importance of clinicians within such a team having the skills to work with people with co-morbid diagnoses (e.g. autism) and people with trauma backgrounds and problematic substance use. Originality/value This paper demonstrates the complexity of the service users who are supported by the CFT, as well as the integral role played in supporting individuals to move to less restrictive settings, with positive outcomes.

Ben Okri"s "The Comic Destiny" from Tales of Freedom (2009) is a sobering modern fable that represents a new form of dialogue within the context of dispossession, slavery (in its broadest terms) and fragmented human relationships. Okri confronts familiar history across borders. Profoundly affected by the Nigerian Civil War, Okri confesses to a preoccupation with justice, a key theme in the story. For Okri, a poet-seer, justice alludes to the existence of the ideal lying beyond reality, within a proto-rationalistic worldview. This article briefly discusses the fable as fictional mode and the symbolism of the forest as setting. This is a contribution to clarifying Okri's gnomic fable with reference to the use of literary, historical and imaginative moral echoes. It suggests that the text contains allusive cross-references to his own Starbook (2007) and Beckett"s Play, reproduced as a film called Comédie. There are feint echoes too of Dante"s Divine Comedy, originally entitled Comédie. This reading is deduced from the meaning of comédie coupled with the title, thrust and setting of "The Comic Destiny" with its largely unnamed, world-weary dramatis personae lost in an infernal clearing in the forest. Employing the stichomythic dialogic stance of Greek tragicomedy, this modern fable dramatizes the way in which personality tends to obstruct reception and communication. Beckett"s thesis is that language perpetuates communicative impasse, while perception is marred by the observer"s infecting the observed with his or her own mobility. Okri goes "beyond" Beckett"s separate dynamisms; he exposes the iniquities of slavery, broadly speaking, and the paradoxical resilience of the enslaved, and hints at a redemption of suffering, through an imaginative quest to regain our true state of being.

This paper cites MorrisseyÕs haiku as encapsulating D.H. LawrenceÕs theory of Ôspirit of placeÕ in which each country has its own peculiar identity that shapes its inhabitants. It argues that MungoshiÕs work evokes this ÔspiritÕ, the distinctive, exclusive essence of Zimbabwe: the land and its people. pirit of PlaceÕ, by the South African poet, Norman Morrissey, 1 from a collection entitled Seasons, provides both title and point of departure for this discussion of Charles MungoshiÕs The Setting Sun and the Rolling World. 2The place misses them Ð the Bushmen who know this tint stroking the mountain.