When I was in state prison in Georgia in 2013, I heard about a class called “Motivation for Change.” I think it had to do with changing your mindset. I’m not actually sure, though, because I was never able to take it. On the first day, the classroom was full, and the teacher was asking everybody’s name. When my turn came, I had to write my name on a piece of paper and give it to a guy to speak it for me. The teacher wrote me a message on a piece of paper: “Are you deaf?”
“Yes, I’m deaf,” I said.
Then she told me to leave the room. I waited outside for a few minutes, and the teacher came out and said, “Sorry, the class is not open to deaf individuals. Go back to the dorm.”
I was infuriated. I asked several other deaf guys in the prison about it, and they said the same thing happened to them. From that point forward, I started filing grievances. They kept denying them, of course. Every other class—the basic computer class, vocational training, a reentry program—I would get there, they would realize I was deaf, and they would kick me out. It felt like every time I asked for a service, they were like, fuck you, no you can’t have that. I was just asking for basic needs; I didn’t have a way to communicate. And they basically just flipped me the bird.
While I was in prison they had no American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. None of the staff knew sign language, not the doctors or the nurses, the mental health department, the administration, the chaplain, the mail room. Nobody. In the barbershop, in the chow hall, I couldn’t communicate with the other inmates. When I was assaulted, I couldn’t use the phone to call the Prison Rape Elimination Act (a federal law meant to prevent sexual assault in prison) hotline to report what happened. And when they finally sent an interviewer, there was no interpreter. Pretty much everywhere I went, there was no access to ASL. Really, it was deprivation.
I met several other deaf people while I was incarcerated. But we were all in separate dorms. I would have liked to meet with them and sign and catch up. But I was isolated. They housed us sometimes with blind folks, which for me made communication impossible. They couldn’t see my signs or gestures, and I couldn’t hear them. They finally celled me with another deaf inmate for about a year. It was pretty great, to be able to communicate with someone. But then he got released, and they put me with another blind person.
When I met with the prison doctor, I explained that I needed a sign language interpreter during the appointment. They told me no, we’d have to write back and forth. The doctor asked me to read his lips. But when I encounter a new person, I can’t really read their lips. And I don’t have a high literacy level, so it’s pretty difficult for me to write in English. I mean, my language is ASL. That’s how I communicate on a daily basis. Because I had no way to explain what was going on, I stopped going to the doctor.
My health got worse. I came to find out later that I had cancer. When I went to the hospital to have it removed, the doctor did bring an interpreter and they explained everything in sign language. I didn’t understand, why couldn’t the prison have done that in the first place? When I got back to prison, I had a lot of questions about the medicines I was supposed to take. But I couldn’t ask anyone.
I did request mental health services. A counselor named Julie was very nice and tried her best to tell the warden I needed a sign language interpreter. The warden said no. They wanted to use one of the hearing inmates in the facility who used to be an interpreter because he grew up in a home with deaf parents. But Julie felt that was inappropriate, because of privacy concerns. Sometimes, we would try to use Video Remote Interpreting, but the screen often froze. So I was usually stuck having to write my feelings down on paper. I didn’t have time to process my emotions. I just couldn’t get it across. Writing all that down takes an exorbitant amount of time: I’d be in there for 30 minutes, and I didn’t have the time to write everything I wanted to. Julie wound up learning some sign language. But it just wasn’t enough.
My communication problems in prison caused a lot of issues with guards, too. One time, I was sleeping, and I didn’t see it was time to go to chow. I went to the guard and said, “Hey man, you never told me it was chow time.” I was writing back and forth to the guard, and he said he can’t write because it’s considered personal communication, and it was against prison policy for guards to have a personal relationship with inmates. That happened several times. I would have to be careful writing notes to officers, too, because it looked to the hearing inmates like I was snitching.
Once they brought me to disciplinary court, but they had me in shackles behind my back, so I had no way to communicate. Two of the corrections officers in the room were speaking to me. All I saw were lips moving. I saw laughter. One of the guards was actually a pretty nice guy, one of the ones who was willing to write things down for us deaf folks. He tried to get them to take the cuffs off me. He wrote, guilty or not guilty? But the others would not uncuff me. I wanted to write not guilty. I wanted to ask for an interpreter. But I couldn’t. They said, “OK, you have nothing to say? Guilty.” That infuriated me. I started to scream. That was really all that I could do. They sent me to the hole, and I cried endlessly. It’s hard to describe the fury and anger.
Prison is a dangerous place for everyone, but that’s especially true for deaf folks.
Jeremy Woody, 48, was released from Central State Prison in Georgia in August 2017, after serving four years for a probation violation. He now lives near Atlanta. He is currently suing Georgia corrections officials over his treatment in prison, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Disability Rights Program and the ACLU of Georgia. Woody spoke to The Marshall Project through an American Sign Language interpreter.
The Georgia Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment concerning allegations in this interview.
This is appalling on every level- I want to know, are prisoners not protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act? Does this treatment not constitute discrimination? I realize obviously that things that are discriminatory happen every day regardless of their legality, but this is so blatant that I have to wonder if there’s some legal mechanism that strips deaf prisoners of their rights the way felons are stripped of their voting rights.
The ADA absolutely applies to prisoners, and in fact I used to work for a law firm that advocates for prisoners, and we won a lawsuit in my state that said that this bullshit and other types of non-accommodation of the disabled were illegal. We eventually were given authority to monitor the prisons for compliance with the ADA because the corrections department repeatedly refused to comply voluntarily.
Unfortunately, because of apathy and antipathy at the legislative level, these rights only get enforced in the judiciary after someone or some interest group sued, and that takes years. In the mean time, disabled and sick prisoners suffer.
Tag: audism
funniest thing ever said to me was “you can’t use deaf as an excuse every time you don’t hear something.” to me, a deaf person,,
this is important!
(photo description:)
a tweet from Joshua Castille/@castillejoshua
“Ok I’m gonna say it… I’m a radical I believe that deaf children deserve a family who can sign in an official language. I believe that all children deserve ASL AS THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE. I believe parents who deprive their deaf child of ASL are actively neglecting their child.”
“The baby sign language phenomenon connects to what culturally deaf people celebrate as “Deaf Gain:” the notion that all of humanity can gain significant benefits and insights from Deaf visual-spatial contributions to the world, including A.S.L. and all its rich linguistic possibilities. Deaf friends I talk with applaud hearing parents for learning some signs with their children, and express hope that, someday, more people will use a signed language on an everyday basis, making communication easier for all of us. But the developers and users of baby sign language don’t necessarily see A.S.L. fluency as a goal. Many of the books and websites actually assure parents that they don’t need to learn full A.S.L., and also that using baby signs won’t impede a child’s spoken language acquisition. […] Finally, there is one more reason I feel ambivalent when my hearing acquaintances tell me they are using baby signs with their children. Often, I notice that these acquaintances are people who have never attempted to use any sign language with me — even though I am deaf, even though I am the one person they know who could most benefit from visual communication. This omission strikes me as a huge loss, even a huge injustice. […] For decades, medical and educational professionals have discouraged hearing parents from signing with their deaf children. My own parents were told not to sign with me when I was a baby — and then proceeded to disregard that advice, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Some of these professionals believe that speech is superior and signing is only a crutch for spoken language acquisition, despite the fact that A.S.L. has been recognized as a full language since the 1960s. The consequences of this philosophy of enforced speech for deaf education, literacy and language development have been disastrous: It has meant that many deaf children never acquire a fluent native language that will enable them to reach their potential. This is starting to change, but most deaf children still do not receive full A.S.L. exposure in their early years, which are critical for language acquisition. The fundamental injustice of the baby sign-language trend is that our culture touts the benefits of signing for hearing children, but disregards A.S.L. for the deaf children who need it the most.”
— Rachel Kolb, Sign Language Isn’t Just for Babies
(via k-pagination)
Deaf supermarket employee punched by customer asking where item is
What the entire fuck is wrong with people?!?
Deaf supermarket employee punched by customer asking where item is
Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People
The problems with all of those sign language translation gloves that keep getting media hype. Excerpt:
[A]ll the sign-language translation gloves invented so far misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.
And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.
[…]
Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”
That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”
[…]
That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.
“Deaf inmates are punished for missing count or mealtimes, though the announcements are made over loudspeakers they cannot hear. They are beaten by guards for misunderstanding orders, and, when they successfully lip-read one interaction and fail the next, they are beaten for ‘feigning’ their hearing loss. In addition, because prisons rarely provide certified ASL interpreters, the inmates struggle to defend themselves at disciplinary proceedings and have limited or no access to medical, mental health, or justice center professionals. They also lack access to any tailored social, educational, or rehabilitative programming. This, by design, is the nature of prisons—undesirables are hidden, with limited attempts at reintegration or socialization between the incarcerated and society (translating, on its face at least, to less manpower and money spent by the corrections system).”
Ableism, the English to Prison Pipeline, and the Plight of Deaf Inmates
“Deaf inmates are punished for missing count or mealtimes, though the announcements are made over loudspeakers they cannot hear. They are beaten by guards for misunderstanding orders, and, when they successfully lip-read one interaction and fail the next, they are beaten for ‘feigning’ their hearing loss. In addition, because prisons rarely provide certified ASL interpreters, the inmates struggle to defend themselves at disciplinary proceedings and have limited or no access to medical, mental health, or justice center professionals. They also lack access to any tailored social, educational, or rehabilitative programming. This, by design, is the nature of prisons—undesirables are hidden, with limited attempts at reintegration or socialization between the incarcerated and society (translating, on its face at least, to less manpower and money spent by the corrections system).”
Ableism, the English to Prison Pipeline, and the Plight of Deaf Inmates
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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