| Volume 2, Issue 2 | June 2008 |
This year's theme will be It is time for an empty nest, which will focus on the restorative process for Deaf ex-offenders after prison. This theme illustrates the process that a mother bird takes to prepare baby birds to "leave the nest" in the same way that the local church and community services organizations should get involved to prepare Deaf prisoners to "leave prison" successfully.
For more information about the conference and to register, please go to
our
conference registration web page. We hope to see you in Columbus, Ohio in October!
The success of Healing Hands Ranch depends on many things. Funding, staff, your support and volunteers. We have several people who volunteer their time and expertise to Healing Hands Ranch. Without our volunteers, we would not be able to effectively help our residents succeed in our program! In the picture shown here, you can see one of our board members, Arthur Craig teaching Celebrate
Recovery (an addiction recovery class) to our residents. Arthur comes out to
Healing Hands Ranch every week for a couple of hours to teach this important
class. Our residents benefit greatly from this class as they learn how to
overcome various kinds of addictions that caused them to have an inappropriate
lifestyle.
We also have another person who comes out to Healing Hands Ranch every week to help our residents improve their sign language skills. You might be wondering why would Deaf ex-offenders need to learn sign language? Some of our residents have been in prison for a long time and have lost "touch" with new signs and have developed prison sign language which is not recognized outside of prison. By having a refresher sign language course, it helps our residents get back into mainstream sign language. We are also rolling out another program that is being developed by another volunteer to help our residents and Deaf people in prison improve their vocabulary. This will help them keep up with new words that they might not know. These are just a few examples of how our volunteers help us at Healing Hands Ranch.
Some of our volunteers come one time for a full day or a whole weekend, others come on a regular basis, and yet others volunteer through mail correspondence. No matter how our volunteers get involved, we appreciate them very much. If you are interested in volunteering your time in some way or would like more information, feel free to contact us and let us know!
Question: How many Deaf people are in American prisons today?
Answer: This is a tricky question because no one really knows. Prisons generally will not provide this information because it is considered a part of the inmate's medical records and prisons do not give out medical information. However, if logic tells us that roughly 1% of the American population is Deaf (those who depend on ASL for communication), then we can reasonably surmise that 1% of the prison population is Deaf. We know that there are just over 2 million Americans incarcerated in prison today, therefore, we estimate there are about 20,000 Deaf people in prison. Of course, this number might be high because we personally know that there are about 100 Deaf men incarcerated in the State of Texas and Texas has the 2nd largest prison population after the state of California. We have not heard of prison populations of larger than 100 Deaf people in any other state so if we follow that logic, then we come up with, at most, 100 Deaf inmates per state, or 5,000 Deaf people in prison. So the real answer could be anyone's guess!
Have a question? Send in your question to us at newsflash@deafprison.org and we might publish your question and our answer in a future issue of our eNewsletter!
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