Although I worked in prison for ten years, I have a confession.  Never once did it cross my mind that anyone behind bars might be deaf. Not once did I imagine being hearing impaired and having doors close behind me without the familiar clang or living with the fear of what was happening when announcements came over a loud speaker and I couldn't hear them.  I didn't give a thought to facing the inability to call home on a simple phone or experiencing the shock when guards came rushing by me in their hazmat suits to try and stop someone from committing suicide.

No, being deaf and being behind bars were never coupled in my imagination.

So when I heard that Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts was hosting a conference, I jumped on it. Set up by Dr. Aviva Twersky Glasner who teaches criminal justice and has done extensive research in the field of deaf adults in prisons, a nationally known expert, Dr. Brendan Monteiro was the featured speaker and there were a host of others who chimed in about this subject that seemed fairly mysterious before the day began.

But while there are some articles I found about well-known cases (Mother Jones and  deafinprison, an important blog on the subject)  there 's not much research out there.  And worse for prisoners, there is a real deficit in the understanding that those behind bars have about how to work with the deaf. Here are a few surprising facts I learned:

• According to Twersky, deaf prisoners are deafer than their counterparts in the free world. This might not make sense to you but Twersky explains this with the coupling of emotional issues that arise from incarceration.
• Marsha Graham, an attorney who works with the deaf, said that one of the biggest problems all through the system from courts to prisons is the lack of deaf interpreters. There are only 8 certified in Massachusetts. She mentioned an example of a deaf woman being battered and police came but tased her because she was screaming so loud. She spent 4 days in a cell without an interpreter.
• Many deaf prisoners cannot participant in their own trials
• Many have no access to TTY equipment to make phone calls home to loved ones when they're behind bars.
• Medical care while dismal for everyone in prison, is especially dismal for hearing impaired prisoners who cannot communicate well with doctors and have no interpreters behind bars.
• Police are not trained to deal with deaf people when they make arrests.  Imagine an officer approaching you from behind and you cannot hear, just for an example.
• In England a law was passed insisting that those arrested who were deaf be given an interpreter and 70% of police officers were unaware of the guidelines.
• Imagine being deaf in solitary confinement.

James Ridgeway has written most eloquently about the plight of deaf prisoners.  He says, in Mother Jones, "But according to two researchers, as many as one-third of the entire U.S. prison population of 1.7 million have difficulty hearing—with some of them being profoundly deaf… Almost two-thirds of deaf prisoners, according to some studies, are in jail for violent and often sexual offenses committed against children. (The deaf are themselves at increased risk for abuse as children, the researchers point out.)… Prisoners who are illiterate as well as deaf are especially deprived when they find themselves in the criminal justice system. They seldom have been educated beyond second grade and, as a consequence, have trouble reading and writing. Because they are deaf and without competent interpreters, they can’t go to AA meetings or drug counseling or make it through educational programs."

I think of my cousin who lost much of his hearing as a child and I try to imagine him behind bars.  I can only see blonde hair and a wispy face.  The taunting alone makes me cringe never mind what it would have done to him. He never needed to learn to sign but I wonder now if that was the right decision, forcing him into the world of the hearing.  Normalizing him.  Would he have felt more at home if he could have been one of the people I saw today, filling the room at lunch where over 70 people were signing to each other, smiling and sharing something they knew to be true while the other thirty of us watched, fascinated and a little sorry we had never learned their language.

I know I won't go into a prison again without asking officials if they have anyone on staff who is trained to work with the deaf.