{"id":17166,"date":"2012-01-11T05:57:54","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T10:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/?p=17166"},"modified":"2012-01-11T06:25:18","modified_gmt":"2012-01-11T11:25:18","slug":"the-silent-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2012\/01\/11\/the-silent-treatment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silent Treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Silent Treatment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine serving decades in prison for a crime your sibling framed you for.
\nNow imagine doing it while profoundly deaf.<\/p>\n

By James Ridgeway
\nDecember 16, 2011<\/p>\n

“This is a collect call from a correctional institution,” says the robotic
\nfemale voice at the other end of the line. After a moment of confusion, I
\nrealize it must be Felix Garcia, whom I’d visited several weeks earlier in a
\nnorthern Florida prison. He is serving a life sentence for a robbery-murder
\nfor which his own brother now admits to framing him. I’d sent him a card for
\nhis 50th birthday. It had a picture of flowers and some lame words of
\nencouragement. Now he’s calling to thank me and to plead for help. His words
\nseem surreal, relayed in the emotionless drone of a TTY operator: Four of
\nhis fellow deaf inmates have tried to commit suicide\u2014one somehow managed to
\nswallow a razor blade. It sounds like he’s thinking about doing the same.
\n“Please,” the voice intones, “will you phone my lawyers? I can’t get
\nthrough to them.”<\/p>\n

Felix has been deaf, for all practical purposes, since childhood. For most
\nof his three decades behind bars, which began when he was 19, he’s been
\nhoused in the general population with few special services for his
\ndisability. His experiences are the stuff of TV prison dramas: He’s ignored
\nor taunted by guards, raped and brutalized by other prisoners. Last year, he
\ntried to hang himself.<\/p>\n

“Felix,” I plead awkwardly. “You are not going to kill yourself. Please,
\nplease, hold on.”<\/p>\n

“I won’t do it,” he says finally. “I have Jesus.”<\/p>\n

I repeat: “Do not kill yourself.”<\/p>\n

“Yes, sir.” The call abruptly cuts off.<\/p>\n

After staring at the phone for a few minutes, I call Pat Bliss, the
\n69-year-old paralegal who has been working on Felix’s case since 1996, when
\nthe Lord told her to minister to prisoners. Pat lives in southern Virginia,
\nalmost 600 miles from Felix’s Florida prison. She doesn’t have a lot of
\nmoney, doesn’t know sign language, and isn’t a lawyer. But for the last 15
\nyears, she has crafted his defense strategies, written motions and briefs,
\nand helped usher his case through the state and federal courts. For the past
\nfive years, Felix has called her “Mom.” One lawyer I talked to calls her “an
\nangel.” And that’s something Felix needs more than anyone I’ve ever met.<\/p>\n

Felix Garcia grew up in a working-class home on the edge of the Hyde Park
\nsection of Tampa, Florida, one of six children in a Cuban American family.
\nHe was born with normal hearing, but almost from birth he suffered from
\nsevere ear infections. A former schoolmate who knew him when they were
\nteenagers remembered how Felix would complain regularly of headaches and
\nearaches, and often miss school: “Felix wore cotton balls in his ears every
\nday,” to keep pus from leaking out, she explained.<\/p>\n

By all accounts, Felix was a good-looking boy with a sweet demeanor who
\nsometimes compensated for his hearing loss by getting girls to tutor him\u2014or
\neven help him cheat. When Felix was very small, he told Pat, his parents
\nonce took him to a clinic to have his ears looked at, but he can’t recall
\nreceiving any treatment. In any case, the problem persisted. “I asked Felix
\nwhy his parents did not take him to the doctor,” his schoolmate recalled.<\/p>\n

“He told me his parents were ashamed of having a child that could not hear
\nso they did not want anyone else to know.” By this time, Felix was having
\ndifficulty understanding people even when they spoke up. He learned to read
\nlips a bit but struggled to speak clearly as he gradually lost the ability
\nto hear his own voice. “When people talk, I had to look into their faces,”
\nhe would explain in court testimony. “I hear sounds, and I hear voices. But
\nI can’t make out the words unless I am looking at the person.” It felt like
\nbeing underwater.<\/p>\n

While still in high school, Felix found work as a brick mason. After
\ngraduating, he had a brief run-in with the law for check kiting, receiving
\nprobation. When he was 19, he and his girlfriend, Michelle Genco, had a baby
\ngirl whom they named Candise. Felix kept doing masonry work when he could
\nget it and lived with his grandmother, whom he described as “very poor, but
\nshe loved me.” At times, he hung around with his siblings, some of whom had
\ngotten involved with, as he puts it, “the street.”<\/p>\n

On August 4, 1981, Felix accompanied his brother Frank, his sister Tina, and
\nher boyfriend, Ray Stanley, to a pawnshop. Frank had a ring he wanted to
\nhock. He said he didn’t have his ID and asked Felix to sign the pawn ticket.
\nThe ring, it turned out, belonged to a man who’d been murdered the day
\nbefore at a motel. Six days later police, having traced the ticket, arrested
\nFelix at Tina and Ray’s house.<\/p>\n

Felix now says that he didn’t understand the officer who read him his
\nMiranda rights. In any case, he insisted he knew nothing about the crime,
\nand he refused to sign a statement for the police. Michelle and her mother
\nboth later testified that Felix was with them at the time of the killing,
\neating pizza and watching videos at the mother’s home. But Frank\u2014who knew
\nthe victim and had left fingerprints at the scene\u2014cut a deal with the state
\nto avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and
\narmed robbery and fingered Felix as the killer. Tina\u2014who married Ray shortly
\nafter the arrest\u2014also agreed to testify against her younger brother. It
\nwasn’t until nearly a quarter century later that Frank would confess that
\nFelix had had nothing to do with the crime.<\/p>\n

At Felix’s trial, in 1983, an expert declared that the defendant had a
\n70-decibel hearing loss, which is considered severe deafness. Through most
\nof the proceedings, he had cotton in his ears to stop the pus. Felix was
\ngiven a hearing aid, which he said didn’t work, and a loudspeaker, which
\namplified noise but didn’t help him understand what people were saying. He
\ntried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had
\nno clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as
\nto what was going on.<\/p>\n

“Deaf people have a hard time when they are thrown into the criminal-justice
\nsystem,” says MacKay Vernon, a psychologist and authority on the deaf who is
\nfamiliar with the details of Felix’s situation. “The courts\u2014judges,
\nprosecutors, defense lawyers\u2014just don’t understand what they’re up against.
\nTurning up the sound system doesn’t mean the defendant better understands
\nwhat’s going on. He just hears more noise. In the case of Felix, sign
\nlanguage interpreters wouldn’t be much help because at the time of the trial
\nhe couldn’t understand signs. And anyhow, sign language interpreters can’t
\nkeep up with the speech in courts. Moreover, deaf people often don’t have
\nthe vocabulary to understand. Their ability to read can lag far behind
\nhearing people.”<\/p>\n

Even when he took the stand, Felix struggled to understand what the lawyers
\nwere asking him. Years later, after reviewing the trial transcript, Pat
\nasked Felix why he had been so quick to answer “yes” to one question after
\nanother. “If I say no, they’re going to think I’m stupid,” he replied. “Plus
\nI wanted to get off the stand and go home. And Frank told me they would not
\nconvict me for something I didn’t do.” At another point, Felix said, “If I
\nsay no, they will do it all again\u2026I spent a long time in that place. I
\nwanted out.” (By trial time, he already had been in jail for two years.) “It
\nis tragic,” says Dick Watts, a criminal attorney who later helped represent
\nFelix. It’s easy to be confused because “Felix smiles, nods\u2026but he doesn’t
\nunderstand.”<\/p>\n

On July 23, 1983, Felix was convicted on the basis of his siblings’
\ntestimony and the pawn ticket he’d signed for Frank\u2014the only piece of
\nphysical evidence against him. He received a life sentence for first-degree
\nmurder and a concurrent 99 years for armed robbery and was placed in a
\nmaximum-security lockup. He and Michelle parted ways, and he never saw her
\nagain (although he has recently been in touch with his grown daughter). His
\nmother visited a few times, but then he called Pat to say he’d received a
\nletter from his parents saying they were moving to Tennessee, and that if
\nFelix ever got out he shouldn’t bother looking for them. When Felix’s
\nchildhood friend connected with the family years later, “His father told me
\nhe once had a son named Felix, but that person was in the Polk Correctional
\nInstitution.”<\/p>\n

At Polk, Felix met a few other deaf inmates, who taught him some sign
\nlanguage. But his world grew ever more silent and menacing as he lost what
\nwas left of his hearing. By 1987, when he finally got an operation that
\nhelped stop the pus drainage, he was profoundly deaf. In prison, Felix lived
\nalone in a kind of sensory solitary confinement\u2014until Pat Bliss found him.<\/p>\n

To get to Pat’s home from Washington, DC, you drive five hours south through
\nthe Shenandoah Valley, with the Blue Ridge Mountains on the left and the
\nAlleghenys rising to the right. Wytheville, a town of about 8,000 tucked
\ninto the rolling hillsides of western Virginia, is little more than one long
\nstreet surrounded by horse and cattle pastures. A country road winds out of
\ntown, past the turnoff for the First Assembly of God church, which Pat
\ndescribes as her home away from home. A little further on, atop a hill,
\nstands a five-sided house that serves as her one-woman defense headquarters.<\/p>\n

Pat is a short, thin woman, twice married, once widowed, and now in the
\nmidst of a divorce. She lives alone in this big house decorated with teddy
\nbears and wallpaper with pictures of deer. When she speaks, she is right to
\nthe point, and if you need some fact about Felix, she’ll hustle into her
\noffice, where the walls are adorned with photos and documents from his case.
\nHis only personal possessions, his early photo albums, are displayed on one
\nshelf.<\/p>\n

Pat grew up on carnival lots in Canada. “My mom and dad made candied apples,
\nsaltwater taffy, cotton candy, caramel crisp, and traveled to local fairs
\nand carnivals in Ontario,” she explains. “Ever since I was eight years old,
\nI was running the cash register.” The family eventually moved to Florida,
\nwhere Pat spent eight years working as a flight attendant for United
\nAirlines. She later got married and was living in Clearwater and working for
\nBic when her husband, Jack, one day called to her to “come see this guy on
\nTV.” It was Jimmy Swaggart. “I felt the spirit of the Lord,” she recalls.
\n“That’s what I needed. It filled this empty void in me.”<\/p>\n

She was born again on Palm Sunday in 1986. But after Jack died of cancer,
\nPat was at loose ends, watching a lot of cop shows on TV. Her life changed
\nin December 1990, when “I got a prophetic message from the Lord,” she
\nrecalls; a woman in her Bible study “spoke out the message” that he was
\nsending her to work among prisoners. Soon afterward, she heard about the
\nwork of Chuck Colson\u2014the Watergate conspirator who went on to found a
\nministry called Prison Fellowship\u2014and attended one of his weekend trainings.<\/p>\n

Dedicating herself to her new calling, Pat took courses in law and landed a
\njob at a county law library. She also began working for defense lawyers as a
\nliaison to the local jails. After she helped an indigent prisoner who had
\nbeen sentenced to many more years than the law allowed, inmates began
\nseeking her out. In October 1996, she got a package from an inmate at Polk
\nwho was helping Felix Garcia with sign interpretation. The package contained
\nsome of Felix’s legal documents and a note that said, “This is a charity
\ncase. See what can be done.” By the time she’d finished reading the file,
\nPat was determined to help Felix.<\/p>\n

She immediately started preparing motions aimed at overturning Felix’s
\nconviction in the Florida courts. The first motion, arguing that Felix’s
\nconstitutional rights were violated because of his inability to understand
\ntrial testimony, was quickly shot down. In Florida, as in many states,
\ndefendants have only two years from the time of their direct appeal to file
\nsuch motions. The deadline for Felix had passed some 12 years earlier.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, the federal courts have provided recourse for constitutional
\nclaims that have timed out in state courts. But the Anti-Terrorism and
\nEffective Death Penalty Act, championed by Bill Clinton and passed with
\nbroad bipartisan support in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, imposed
\ntime limits on such cases. “These statutes of limitations are just killers,”
\nsays Steve Bright, senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights,
\nnoting that the law cuts off appeals even in capital cases.<\/p>\n

Laura Rovner, a former attorney for the National Association for the Deaf
\n(NAD) who now runs the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver’s
\nSturm College of Law, says Felix could well have had his conviction
\noverturned were it not for that missed deadline. Under the Rehabilitation
\nAct of 1973, any entity receiving federal money needs to have an effective
\ncommunication system in place for the deaf or hard of hearing. “It is hard
\nto think of a situation where that is more critical than where somebody is
\nbeing tried for a serious crime,” Rovner says.<\/p>\n

The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) strengthened that
\nrequirement, demanding that the criminal-justice system take “appropriate
\nsteps” to make sure a disabled person can communicate as effectively as
\nanyone else. This might require “appropriate auxiliary aids and services,”
\nsuch as a setup akin to closed captioning or an oral interpreter to
\nfacilitate lip reading.<\/p>\n

In fact, criminal justice agencies “frequently do not honor the letter and
\nspirit of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act,” says Howard Rosenblum, who
\nheads the NAD. “The challenge has been to actually litigate against every
\nlaw enforcement agency, lawyer, court, and prison that violate the
\nrequirements.” The\u00a0Justice Department could enforce the requirements, he
\nadds, but to a large degree has failed to do so. (The DOJ asked me to submit
\nwritten questions for this story but did not respond to them by press time.)<\/p>\n

In 2003, Pat went back to the Florida courts with fresh evidence that wasn’t
\nsubject to the time limit. Felix’s brother Frank, who was still serving his
\ntime, had sent Felix a letter admitting that he and Ray had done the killing
\nand that “Felix Garcia was never at the scene of the crime or had any
\nparticipation.”<\/p>\n

Frank was the star witness at an evidentiary hearing the court finally
\ngranted more than three years later. Pat had collected affidavits from five
\ninmates who had known Frank in various prisons. All of them swore that Frank
\nhad told them he’d blamed his little brother for the murder because he was
\nafraid he’d get the death penalty. Taking the stand, Frank initially
\nresponded to most of the questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment. Then,
\nsuddenly, he turned to the judge and asked: “How much does perjury carry?
\nFive years? I’ll do that. Felix Garcia did not have nothing to do with that
\nmurder case.It was me and Raymond Stanley that did it. I’ll take the five
\nyears.”<\/p>\n

Felix’s attorney, Dick Watts, kept interrogating Frank:<\/p>\n

Q. Felix’s ID was used for a pawn, is that right?<\/p>\n

A. Yes. I gave him the jewelry.<\/p>\n

Q. Did he know where the jewelry came from?<\/p>\n

A. No, he did not.<\/p>\n

Q. Why did you give it to Felix?<\/p>\n

A. I didn’t have ID.<\/p>\n

Q. So, Felix got hooked into this by\u2014by that incident?<\/p>\n

A. That incident, yes.<\/p>\n

Q. And you are saying today that he was not involved in the planning, wasn’t
\nthere, didn’t participate in any way?<\/p>\n

A. He had nothing to do with it.<\/p>\n

Q. It was you and who else?<\/p>\n

A. And Raymond Stanley\u2026<\/p>\n

Nearly a year later, the judge denied Felix’s motion for retrial or release,
\nsaying he couldn’t tell what was true and what was a lie. Pat was
\ndevastated. “We were in court 10 months with depositions, and we were
\ndenied,” she recalls as we sit on her living room sofa in the late afternoon
\nsun. “He sat there in that jury box,” she says. Then she begins to cry. “He
\nwas shackled. And he mouthed to me, ‘Why? I am innocent.'”<\/p>\n

Pat remembers turning to Watts as they sat in the courtroom that day. “‘He
\nhas no family. They don’t want anything to do with Felix. He had nobody here
\nduring all our times in court,’ I said. ‘That young man is going to be my
\nson until this is over with. And I’ll be his mom if he wants that.’<\/p>\n

“So,” Pat continues, “I went to the jail after that and I told him, ‘Felix,
\nI am sticking with you till the very end. I will be that mother you don’t
\nhave, that sister you don’t have. I will not let you alone without somebody
\non the outside caring for you.’ And we both cried together. And he called me
\nMom. And he’s called me Mom ever since. He calls me Pat when it’s legal; he
\ncalls me Mom when it’s personal. I will see this young man to the very end,
\ntill he walks out that courtroom door a free man.”<\/p>\n

Until that day, Felix, like other inmates with serious disabilities, will
\nface what David Fathi, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National
\nPrison Project, calls “a nightmare of vulnerability, abuse, and exclusion
\nfrom the most basic prison programs and services. I think prisoners who are
\ndeaf or blind are often the worst off of all.”<\/p>\n

Numbers are hard to come by, since prison authorities often don’t bother to
\ncount deaf inmates. But when Katrina Miller, a former corrections official
\nturned assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, looked at Texas
\nprisons a decade ago, she found that a full 30 percent of inmates were hard
\nof hearing\u2014defined as having a 50 percent hearing loss in one ear.<\/p>\n

Under the ADA, hard-of-hearing inmates are supposed to be provided with the
\nsame “auxiliary aids and services” in prison as in court. But prisons “have
\nroutinely ignored” the legal requirements, says the NAD’s Howard Rosenblum.
\n“Deaf and hard-of-hearing prisoners are unable to understand instructions of
\nguards, to take classes that make them eligible for early release, to learn
\nskills, to know when meals are announced, to know when visitors are here to
\nsee them, to watch television, to use the telephone, to express grievances,
\nto communicate with counselors or doctors, and to defend against claims of
\nmisconduct.”<\/p>\n

Jack Cowley, a former prison warden in Oklahoma who now serves on the
\nadvisory board of the National Institute of Corrections, says there can be
\nwide gaps between policy and practice. “While most directors of corrections,
\nand perhaps even wardens would say, ‘Oh yes, we make accommodation’\u2026there is
\nstill this sort of deliberate indifference when it comes to back in the
\ncellblocks,” Cowley told me. “Most state facilities are aware of deaf
\ninmates and try to house them together and they look out for one another,
\nand hopefully some staff member will find some compassion and look after
\nthem.” But “there’s not a lot of sympathy in the halls.”<\/p>\n

In theory, Felix could file a federal civil rights lawsuit\u2014but there he
\nwould run into the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a Clinton-era law that
\nmakes it extraordinarily difficult for prisoners to bring a case in the
\nfederal courts. Class-action suits in New York and Virginia have somewhat
\nimproved services for deaf prisoners in those states, and similar suits have
\nbeen filed against the Illinois corrections department and the federal
\nBureau of Prisons. Earlier this year, two attorneys sued the Florida
\nDepartment of Corrections seeking to win deaf inmates access to a device
\nthat would enable them to watch TV or listen to the radio. But their
\nclass-action suit was dismissed after corrections officials argued that the
\ntiny gadget could be used to hide contraband. In any case, the officials
\nclaimed, the state housed too few deaf inmates to justify a class action.
\nHow few? In a deposition, the department’s ADA-compliance official admitted
\nshe had no idea. (In December, a DOC spokeswoman told me Florida has 74
\ninmates receiving services related to a hearing impairment.)<\/p>\n

Felix may not have much going for him, but at least he has Pat. She gets on
\nthe phone with prison classification officers\u2014who dole out stints in
\nsolitary confinement and other punishments\u2014explaining that Felix is not
\nbeing unruly when he doesn’t answer a guard. If he has a medical problem,
\nshe talks to the prison doctors. She saves up to visit Felix in person once
\na year. They used to speak on the phone weekly, until the TTY calls became
\ncollect, a luxury Pat couldn’t afford. Now they correspond by mail.
\nSometimes Felix’s letters don’t arrive. He says the guards tear them up.<\/p>\n

With Pat’s guidance, I eventually receive permission to interview Felix face
\nto face. After driving all the way down from Virginia, Pat picks me up in
\nher red Nissan Xterra at the Jacksonville airport. The Jefferson
\nCorrectional Institute is about two hours due west; the final approach takes
\nus through farmland and down a narrow tree-lined road. The prison itself
\nconsists of an innocuous-looking group of low, sand-colored buildings with
\ndark, slanted roofs. A friendly classification officer leads us through the
\ngrounds and into a building where an assistant warden welcomes us and clears
\nout his office for our interview. Leaning against the wall about 10 feet
\noff, facing away from us, is a tall man with short salt-and-pepper hair. I
\nautomatically call out, “Hi Felix,” before reminding myself aloud, “Oh,
\nright, he can’t hear me.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, Garcia?” says the warden. “He can hear.”<\/p>\n

In fact, the prison’s medical staff has deemed Felix profoundly deaf, with
\nhearing loss exceeding 90 decibels. This means he can hear, in some muffled
\nfashion, the sound of a car horn, a motorcycle, or a jet taking off, but not
\nhuman voices. Felix says his prison-issued hearing aid doesn’t make speech
\nmore understandable; it merely amplifies the din, allowing him to hear cell
\ndoors clanging shut and alarms going off. But because he can read lips a
\nlittle bit, and because he tries hard to understand and accommodate, the
\nprison’s nonmedical staff has the impression that he hears more than he lets
\non. “I am being assaulted by a certain officer,” he’d written to Pat. “He
\nwill not let me sleep. He will not let me rest kicking on my door and today
\nhe pushed me down and spit on me trying to get me to say something.”<\/p>\n

As I record Felix with my little Flip camera, guards pace the corridor
\noutside. Felix speaks and signs simultaneously, and Pat\u2014who knows only
\nrudimentary sign language, but is used to Felix\u2014understands him pretty well.
\nHe’s used to her, too, and can reads her lips effectively, so she repeats my
\nquestions. Behind his round glasses, Felix’s face is gaunt but expressive.
\nHis voice contains a note of desperation.<\/p>\n

He explains that his situation has deteriorated rapidly in the past year. He
\nwas removed from Polk, where he had a small community of deaf acquaintances,
\nand sent to a series of other prisons before landing here. Shortly before
\nthe move, he’d seen Candise, now 30, for the first time since she was three
\nmonths old; his daughter lives in Florida, but too far away to visit
\nregularly. None of the prisoners around him is hearing impaired and he
\nhasn’t been getting access to sign-language interpreters. He lives in fear
\nof offending fellow prisoners by misunderstanding them or inadvertently
\nignoring their questions, and then paying the price; indeed, shortly after
\narriving at Jefferson, Felix got into a fight and was briefly thrown into
\nsolitary confinement.<\/p>\n

After we talk for a bit, I ask him about the rape. It happened about a year
\nago, when two men assaulted Felix in a shower at the Florida DOC’s Reception
\nand Medical Center in Lake Butler. He reported it, despite fears of
\nretribution, and for weeks afterwards, he says, he spent hours crouching in
\nterror against his cell door, trying to discern the noise of an approaching
\nguard or assailant. Later, after being transferred to the Madison
\nCorrectional Institution, Felix attempted to hang himself with a bedsheet.
\nPrison staff put him on suicide watch, he says, leaving him naked in a bare,
\ncold cell for six days. (According to the DOC, inmates on suicide watch are
\nclad in a nonflammable, untearable “shroud.”)<\/p>\n

Up until now, no one has written about Felix’s situation, and I worry that
\nFelix\u2014Pat, too\u2014are pinning too much hope on the power of the press. But I
\nalso know that she, at least, understands what they are up against. Beyond
\ntrying to improve Felix’s lot in prison, Pat told me, there are few options.
\nIn his criminal case, every possible angle is exhausted\u2014unless someone with
\nfirsthand knowledge, besides Frank, were to come forward with an account of
\nthe night of the murder.<\/p>\n

In theory, Gov. Rick Scott could grant clemency, but Scott, a tea party
\nchampion elected in 2010, has little inclination toward that sort of move,
\nand has in fact moved to make the clemency process more arduous. Plus, to
\nqualify for clemency, Felix would have to acknowledge guilt, something he
\nrefuses to do. Short of that, he’ll be eligible for parole in 2024, at age
\n63, but even then his odds are abysmal. Last year, just 50 Florida prisoners
\nwere paroled\u20140.1 percent of the total released\u2014and not a single lifer has
\nbeen released on parole since 1995. “While other states cut back because of
\ncosts,” notes the Southern Center for Human Rights’ Steve Bright, “Florida
\nexpands its prison population.”<\/p>\n

In October, Felix was moved to the Tomoka Correctional Institution, where
\nthere are other deaf inmates and some programs are available. He is now a
\nbit less isolated but only slightly less fearful. “Many, many times, deaf
\npeople raped and beat and no help from the officers. Hearing people steal
\nour things,” Felix wrote in a letter MacKay Vernon showed me. “When we try
\nto talk to officers, they just laugh. So hard for us. Many, many times I
\njust want to die but have Jesus in [my] heart\u2026Pray every day to help other
\ndeaf.”<\/p>\n

Source:
\n http:\/\/motherjones.com\/politics\/2011\/12\/deaf-prisoners-felix-garcia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Silent Treatment Imagine serving decades in prison for a crime your sibling framed you for. Now imagine doing it while profoundly deaf. By James Ridgeway December 16, 2011 “This is a collect call from a correctional institution,” says the…<\/p>\n

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The Prison Justice League's Report on the Estelle Unit Floyd Blackburn recently included the following anecdote in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/category\/deaf-news\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23321,"url":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2013\/06\/04\/solitary-watch-reports-on-abuse-of-deaf-disabled-prisoners\/","url_meta":{"origin":17166,"position":2},"title":"Solitary Watch Reports on Abuse of Deaf & Disabled Prisoners","author":"Grant Laird Jr","date":"June 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Deaf Prisoners in Florida Face Abuse and Solitary Confinement May 21, 2013 By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella In the a Florida prison called the Reception and Medical Center, a corrections officer appears at a cell door and begins mocking fake sign language to the man inside, who is deaf.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/category\/deaf-news\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/DN_logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":19475,"url":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2012\/08\/02\/city-settles-suit-brought-by-deaf-resident\/","url_meta":{"origin":17166,"position":3},"title":"City settles suit brought by deaf resident","author":"Grant Laird Jr","date":"August 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Not So Tone Deaf? City settles suit brought by deaf resident BY JORDAN SMITH JULY 31, 2012 For the second time in a decade the city of Austin has settled a federal civil rights suit, reaffirming its agreement to provide training for Austin Police officers on how to effectively communicate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/category\/deaf-news\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18225,"url":"https:\/\/deafnetwork.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2012\/04\/05\/asl-interpreter-wanted-gatesville-texas\/","url_meta":{"origin":17166,"position":4},"title":"ASL Interpreter Wanted – Gatesville, Texas","author":"Grant Laird Jr","date":"April 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"American Sign Language Interpreter Level II or higher Full time and Part time position(s) Location: Lane Murray Facility, Gatesville, Texas (Near Waco and Temple, Texas) Job Summary: Provides interpreting services to female correctional clients receiving services through the Assistive Disability Program. 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