Our Signing Town

Candace McCullough of Alternative Solutions Center blogged about the fact that fully accessible prison was on the bottom of our poll list, and I thought she brought up several interesting points. 

Now, I can not imagine advocating building prison in our town — especially in the early years, even though it would generate a lot of jobs in the town — because of its potential negative impact.

Prison guards, workers and professionals — do they have negative "effect" on the community because of their required and constant contact with criminals, deaf or not? Probably yes. We’d need more research on cities that have large prisons in them.

The whole problem with framing this kind of discussion is… we assume that prisons do work in rehabilitating the criminals. Unfortunately, they do not. I did a term paper for my Sociology class at Gallaudet years ago — ok, I’m old but not THAT old. I recall some statistics showing as high as 67% of inmates bounce back into prisons after being freed. In the prisons, they learn new "trades" from other inmates — if one comes in for burglary, one could come out with newly acquired skills in drug selling, money laundering, and so on. 

Yet, what are humanistic alternative for the deaf and hard of hearing population who are serving out their time in loneliness, isolation and often without any access to much needed psychotherapy, medication and fully accessible group therapy?

What alternatives? Indeed. Discuss in comments! Thanks, Candace!

http://www.ascdeaf.com/blog/?p=210

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Laurent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.