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Christine Vester: Humanity Over Handcuffs: Protecting Autistic Lives in Legal Battles
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Christine Vester shares her mission with Humanity Over Handcuffs, a national advocacy movement protecting autistic individuals from being criminalized by the justice system.
Her organization supports families, educates legal professionals, and works toward reforming a system that often treats neurological differences as criminal behavior.
• Autistic behaviors like lack of eye contact, shutdowns, and sensory overload often misinterpreted by police as aggression or defiance
• Families seeking help unexpectedly find themselves battling a legal system unprepared to understand autism
• Courts routinely fail to consider autism as a mitigating factor, treating autistic individuals like typical defendants
• Prison environments create traumatic sensory overload for autistic individuals, who may face targeting by other inmates
• Incarceration carries long-lasting consequences, creating barriers to housing, employment, and community reintegration
• Humanity Over Handcuffs is developing resources connecting families with attorneys, mental health professionals, and support systems
• Change requires judges, attorneys, legislators, and CIT trainers working together to create more compassionate approaches
You're not alone and not powerless.
Our children are not broken, autism is not a crime, and together we can show what justice should really look like—humanity first.
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intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapters
1. Welcome to Why Not Me? The World (00:00:00)
2. Introducing Humanity Over Handcuffs (00:01:31)
3. Police Response to Autism Crisis (00:02:43)
4. Navigating the Legal System Challenges (00:05:44)
5. Prison's Impact on Autistic Individuals (00:09:31)
6. Resources and Call for Compassionate Reform (00:12:22)
119 episodes
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