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Research Associate, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
Dr Jessica Wheeler is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on the lives and community support experiences of people with intellectual disabilities who have been convicted of criminal offences.
She joined Cambridge in 2004 (after graduating in psychology, from the University of Bristol) to work on a research project that tracked the ‘care pathways’ and referral characteristics of offenders with intellectual disabilities receiving support from a range of specialist UK health services. This work evolved into an NIHR PhD Fellowship that drew on criminological theories to explore the neighbourhoods, and the social and emotional lives, of offenders with intellectual disabilities living in communities in the East of England.
Her current project, which is supported by the NIHR School for Social Care Research, focuses on ‘critical ethical tensions’ associated with the breakdown of community support, and explores the competing values that underpin practices, procedures, and policies in relation to the provision of community support for people with intellectual disabilities who have offended. This work questions the nature of ‘good’ community support for offenders with intellectual disabilities and aims to identify the values, structures, and relationships that mark out ‘good’ services.
