Deaf Prisoner Phone Justice Campaign – Year Three

HEARD has been actively creating allies & empowering others to begin deaf/disabled advocacy work within their own communities. We just submitted our sixth comment to the Federal Communications Commission in our Deaf Prisoner Phone Justice Campaign.

As a result of our tireless efforts, many organizations fighting for phone justice are making clear to the FCC that they mean phone justice for ALL prisoners and their loved ones. Our efforts garnered comments from hundreds of deaf prisoners, and scores of preeminent national civil rights organizations and law firms, including the American Civil Liberties Union; the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice; Deaf CAN! the Human Rights Defense Center; the National Association of the Deaf; the National Disability Rights Network; the Prison Policy Initiative; Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute of the Deaf Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld, LLP; the United Church of Christ, OC Inc., and signatories; Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs; and several public defender offices, among many others.  

Here is the link to HEARD’s most recent FCC comment which incorporated information from a telecommunications usage survey we asked community members to respond to and data from an experiment with RIT/NTID students.