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Editor's Note: The deaf face a nightmare when they fall into the criminal justice system, writes investigative journalist James Ridgeway. The following is a special report written for The Crime Report, a publication of the Center on Media, Crime, and Justice at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, City University of New York. It originally appeared in Ridgeway's blog.

In the 1970s, an antiwar demonstrator found himself at New York City’s Rikers Island jail facility for a couple of months on a disorderly conduct charge. The demonstrator, who happened to be a friend of mine, met a handful of young men from the Bronx in his unit who were deaf.

They were having trouble communicating with anyone but themselves. My friend knew a little sign language and, after a few conversations, discovered they were illiterate. With the idea of helping them improve their communication skills, he asked prison authorities for permission to order books on sign language from the publisher. The wardens refused, saying that they did not want anyone in that prison using a “language” they could not understand. (and the understanding of the deaf prisoners, of course, is completely unimportant, yes/yes?!)

Things may have changed a little for the better since then. But not by much.MORE

The notoriously draconian Rockefeller drug laws have been filling New York Prisons and inciting widespread condemnation by everyone from judges to prisoners to prosecutors for over thirty years. Just last week, hundreds rallied for their repeal as Governor David Patterson of New York moves to "drop the rock," or at least reform its worst elements.
An often overlooked story is the impact of the Rockefeller drug laws on female prisoners and their families.
Recently, I had the chance to talk with two artists, Liza Jessie Peterson and Hazelle Goodman, and formerly incarcerated activist Vivian Gonzalez of the Women's Prison Association, about the issues that women face in US prisons.

The Wall Street Journal tells us that private prisons are expanding in very specific places Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.
Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country's 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

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So, not to put too fine a point on it, so what? Well, the problem is that the census takes place in two years, and since 1990 prisoners have been counted in the census as residents of the place they're incarcerated in. The census, which apportions, among other things, representation for states in the House of Representatives based on how they come out of the census. An awful lot of people who don't get to vote are going to be swelling the numbers in whatever states those private prisons get to settle in.
So if your neighbor gets arrested and he's shipped off to, say, South Carolina, he's not eligible to vote, but he (all five-fifths of him) is counted as a resident of South Carolina for the purposes of the Census.
Which means, bluntly, that if enough people are incarcerated in a district, they can get their very own representative based on very few people who are eligible to vote.
But no, you say. That's hypothetical and silly and does not happen. Well, no.Danny R. Young, a 53-year-old backhoe operator for Jones County in eastern Iowa, was elected to the Anamosa City Council with a total of two votes — both write-ins, from his wife and a neighbor.
While the Census Bureau says Mr. Young’s ward has roughly the same population as the city’s three others, or about 1,400 people, his constituents wield about 25 times more political clout.
That is because his ward includes 1,300 inmates housed in Iowa’s largest penitentiary — none of whom can vote. Only 58 of the people who live in Ward 2 are nonprisoners. That discrepancy has made Anamosa a symbol for a national campaign to change the way the Census Bureau counts prison inmates.

“Do I consider them my constituents?” Mr. Young said of the inmates who constitute an overwhelming majority of the ward’s population. “They don’t vote, so, I guess, not really.”


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So where has this been happening? You'll be amazed.
Twenty one counties in the United States have at least 21% of their population in prison. In Crowley County, Colorado and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, one-third of the population consists of prisoners imported from somewhere else. And I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count, re: precisely where most of these prisoners end up