Ro de Bree says a little prayer every Friday. It's payday for de Bree's son but it's essential that his girlfriend get the cheque before he does.

If her 28-year-old son gets the money he will disappear for days, maybe weeks, and, if he's lucky, surface in jail. The alternatives are too horrifying to think about.

De Bree's adopted son, whose name she asked be withheld, was born to a woman who drank booze while pregnant. The woman got temporarily drunk. The son now lives with permanent brain damage.

"But to meet him you would never know," the Duncan woman said in an interview. "He's a nice guy, keeps up with the news in the paper and listens to the radio and follows his favourite hockey team -- the Canucks, of course."

The son's behaviour is part of the frightening, frustrating irony of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

As a mental disability it's frightening because it lands him in so much trouble. It's frustrating and ironic because the son is able to distinguish right from wrong and success from failure. But the after-affects of fetal alcohol exposure have left a neurological disconnect or misfire in his brain that makes it difficult to navigate his way to the former and avoid the latter.

During a 10-year period, spanning his late teens and through to his mid-20s, every time de Bree's son had a navigation breakdown, he wound up in the criminal justice system, a place that sees a high number of people with FAS but oddly has no specific programs or policies around the issue.

Not that there hasn't been lip service.

During a September speech on fetal alcohol disorders, Premier Gordon Campbell told an audience in Burns Lake the subject had arisen at every Western premiers' conference he has attended. Campbell said he wanted to re-affirm that his government recognizes it "remains a huge problem."

Campbell's signature even appears at the front of a document called Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder: A Strategic Plan for British Columbia. The Ministry of the Attorney General, which is responsible for the court system, is listed as a participant.

But the Attorney General's Ministry has no specific programs dealing with fetal alcohol people. Ministry officials were unwilling to comment despite repeated requests for an interview.

Despite the premier's assertions there seems to be little interest within the provincial justice system to even learn the full extent of the problem. Statistics on the number of fetal alcohol people going through the criminal justice system are hard to find.

The only hard statistic on the subject was compiled in 1999 by psychologists at the University of British Columbia who looked at youth remanded from court for psychiatric assessment. That study found 23.3 per cent of them suffered the ill effects of fetal alcohol exposure. That's as much as 25 times higher than the accepted worldwide incidence. That study first appeared in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and is cited in a book called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Criminal Justice System, published by the Law Foundation of B.C.

There is also an American study compiled by researchers at the University of Washington that followed fetal alcohol kids into and through their teens. It found that 60 per cent of the young people studied had some trouble with the law.

Still, people who work with fetal alcohol say the number is far bigger than anyone wants to acknowledge.

Jen Kyffin, director of the Cowichan Valley FAS Society, can list all the clichés to describe an undisclosed, or under-acknowledged problem to describe the extent of fetal alcohol exposure in the criminal justice system. There's "tip of the iceberg," and "sleeping giant" and the one about the elephant in the room that nobody wants to admit is there.

It's not as if the effects of fetal alcohol exposure are newly discovered. Even in the Old Testament (Judges, chapter 13), an angel warns a pregnant woman to drink no wine or strong drink.

But the scientific/medical knowledge and descriptions are comparatively recent. The extreme effects of alcohol during pregnancy were first reported only in 1968 in France and in North America in 1973. The first medical criteria for diagnosing fetal alcohol syndrome were developed only in 1980.

At its most extreme, a fetal alcohol child can be born small and subsequent growth is badly stunted. The head can be smaller than average, the eyes far apart and the eye slits shorter, giving them a round appearance. The face can be flat, the upper lip thin and the nose flattened. Behavioural and mental development can be severely impaired.

People now tend to lump these extreme characteristics under the term "fetal alcohol syndrome." But professionals are straying away from the rigid physical and development criteria that once defined the syndrome. They now refer to the less obvious, but no less serious, "fetal alcohol effect." And even more recently there is a trend in medicine to use the more inclusive "fetal alcohol spectrum disorder."

This move to a more inclusive definition is the result of studies that show how varied in severity the effects can be. A person exposed to alcohol while still a fetus in the womb can be above average in IQ and as articulate as the finest debater. And they can still be afflicted with some mental deficits and subject to uncontrollable, impulsive behaviour.

"They are not stupid in a sense. That's what makes them perplexing and difficult to work with," said Kimberly Kerns, a professor of neuro-psychology at the University of Victoria who studies the early behavioural problems, mostly in children, associated with fetal alcohol exposure.

Kerns said pre-birth alcohol exposure appears to impair the development of two areas of the brain: the hippocampus, which is connected with memory, and the frontal regions which are connected with organizing and planning behaviours.

A person with this kind of brain damage can have an impairment of what Kerns called "the executive function." Short-term memory is often impaired. The ability to link cause and effect is also impaired. It can be hard for fetal alcohol people to think ahead and anticipate.

So it can be very difficult for them to alter their behaviour in anticipation of the consequences. They can be punished over and over and over again for the same type of offence or misbehaviour and just be seemingly unable to change. They have a neurological defect that makes it difficult, sometimes nearly impossible, for their brains to process information to form a thought like, "If I steal this car I will get caught and probably go to jail."

Similarly their brain just doesn't acknowledge let alone lay out a plan of action based on an abstract concept like, "If everybody took cars that don't belong to them we'd live in motor chaos." Instead the brains of fetal alcohol people often don't get beyond mere impulses like "I want it" or "I need it."

Fetal alcohol people can break into a home to steal money on impulse. They can then get caught because they give into another impulse to sit down in the living room and play a video game.

And other times it's just a matter of being hungry so they help themselves to whatever is on the store shelf.

None of these actions can be entirely described as being driven by criminality. They are, however, all actions that the law defines as criminal.

David Sissons, a Victoria lawyer who has worked as defence and Crown, said he can recall one person who was charged over and over again for stealing cars. The running theme through all his crimes was the colour of the cars -- red.

"It was, 'I see a red car and the door is open, I don't have a choice. I've got to take it,' " said Sissons.

So when it comes to sentencing for a crime, the notion of what the law calls "specific deterrence," that is, punishment to deter the specific individual from doing a crime again, doesn't work for fetal alcohol people.

"What can you do?" said Sissons. "And some of them are quite gentle in their personalities but they just don't get it.

"It's an amazing problem and there really aren't any facilities in the criminal justice system to deal with it," he said.

Defence lawyer Mike Mulligan, chairman of the criminal justice section of the Canadian Bar Association, said he can imagine cases where even a defence lawyer might not want to raise the FAS issue out of fear that a sentencing judge, faced with the admission of an incurable condition, might be tempted to lock a client up for a long, long time.

Mulligan said the real problem arises because the justice system is just not designed to deal with people whose main problem is a brain injury. Criminal justice is about criminality. It is meant to deal with criminals. But someone who runs afoul of the law because of brain damage doesn't deserve trial and punishment. What they need is some sort of social program or agency to keep them from criminal actions.

Police, meanwhile, are beginning to take note of fetal alcohol issue and it's not entirely driven by a newfound social conscience.

RCMP Const. Beth Blackburn, training co-ordinator for Vancouver Island on fetal alcohol issues, said one obvious pitfall for police is how easily led fetal alcohol people can be.

And that can play havoc with police interview techniques. An investigator can be interviewing a suspect in connection with one car theft and before long extract confessions to a whole string of crimes.

It's not that the suspect was trying to boost a criminal reputation. But faced with police interview techniques, the suspect just provided what he thought the officer wanted to hear.

"A lot of our investigators aren't aware of that yet," said Blackburn. "They are doing their job as best as possible and then it's, 'Oh my God, I've just got a confession to 30 vehicle thefts.' "

Looking back over 18 years as a police officer, Blackburn said she can recall arresting people who she now believes must have been exposed to alcohol as a fetus.

"I can't even begin to fathom how many people I've dealt with who had this disability," said Blackburn.

Prisons are also beginning to take some notice of the problem, but typical prison programs aimed at modifying behaviour aren't effective in the long run with people with FAS.

Wayne Willows, spokesman for the B.C. Corrections Branch, says the rigid, structured life in prisons, where there is almost no room for impulsive action, means fetal alcohol people are often model prisoners.

De Bree's son, during one of his stints in prison, was able to complete Grades 11 and 12 in just two months and earn his high school diploma and prove what his parents had always known: their boy is not stupid.

Finally, it should be noted not every person with fetal alcohol effect is destined for criminality. Even the most impulsive of fetal alcohol people can devise routines and structures that keep them out of trouble.

For example, when Dallas Maiale was 16 he beat another person so badly the victim was in hospital for a month. At the age of 17, Maiale was banned from Campbell River. He had torn apart a pool hall in a brawl.

But when he was in his early 20s, for reasons that are now unclear, Maiale decided to undergo some tests. And it was revealed the impulses that seemed to predispose him to violence and petty crime were the result of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Now 25, Maiale can look back at the moment when he learned of his condition as a bit of a relief. "It was, 'Now I know why I react the way I do.' "

Afterwards, Maiale read everything he could find about fetal alcohol syndrome. With self-discipline remarkable in someone so previously impulsive, he built for himself a new way of thinking and reacting to the world around him. His new way began with some simple, never-to-be-broken rules, beginning with "I don't hurt anybody.

"It wasn't a choice," said Maiale. "When you have everybody in your life telling you you are going to wind up dead or in prison, you don't have much of a choice."