“HEARD was great emotional support to me,” Garrett says. “And I felt like I was doing something productive just explaining the stuff that went on with the deaf guys. Talila made me feel like she had our back in any way that she could. I can’t say enough about what help she was to me personally during times when we would get hit with difficulties that seemed so unfair.”

Feelings of isolation and exclusion are also felt within the prison community itself. Deaf prisoners are often not able to participate in prison programs, because the system will not provide an interpreter for them.

Prison movies are not close-captioned.

“I really can’t stand it when I see all hearing inmates have more privileges than deaf inmates,” says Renny Harvard, an inmate in Texas. “For example, they offer all hearing inmates the vocational classes and training programs, and they are allowed to be transferred out of their units to other units for educational purposes. Deaf inmates are not allowed to be transferred out of their unit due to medical reasons and safety issues. Basically, they limit the opportunities and privileges to us because we’re deaf.”

A poor education places an even larger burden on deaf prisoners who, like their hearing counterparts on the inside, generally have a lower level of education. For many, their first language is ASL, and the ability to read and write English comes later in life with more education. A deaf person learning English is like hearing Americans learning a new language for the first time, often not starting until high school and unable to read and write complex sentences in that new language. Many in the prison system remain ignorant to this, or don’t want to go through the trouble of getting a prisoner an interpreter.

“Some people have a third-grade writing level,” says Jay Baldridge, a deaf returned citizen who is grateful for the advantage his education gave him in communicating with prison guards. Others are not so fortunate.

“To bring it down to their level is difficult. A deaf person can get overwhelmed quickly. They still might not understand you,” Baldridge says.

Like Garcia, whose ability to read and write English is at about the fourth-grade level, when he began to go deaf. In ASL, Garcia has no troubles communicating. But in order to respond to written contact, he relies on fellow prisoners to help him. His situation also contributed to perhaps his biggest tragedy. Garcia may be in prison for a crime that he did not commit.

He is serving a life sentence for robbery and murder, crimes that his brother has since confessed to committing and framing Garcia for.

“They blamed me for something my brother and sister did,” Garcia says. His own siblings testified against him in court. At first, Garcia was clueless as to what they had done.

“Without an interpreter present during questioning, he didn’t know what he was being charged with. He thought his brother and sister robbed someone,” Garcia’s advocate Pat Bliss says. “His trial attorney tried to tell the court that he couldn’t understand. The judge said, ‘We’ll let the jury decide if he’s deaf.’”

Lewis, Bliss and other advocates have no doubt that if Felix had had access to an interpreter during police questioning and at trial, his court decision would have been different. And although his brother has since admitted to an appellate court that he lied about Felix to save himself from the death penalty, Garcia remains in prison. Bliss says that they are out of court options.