RBGG’s Gay Grunfeld, who leads the RBGG team representing prisoners with disabilities in Armstrong v. Brown, spoke to Mother Jones for an article that appeared in Mother Jones on June 7, 2018, “Without interpreters, California deaf prisoners are getting stuck behind bars.”
According to the article: “Under federal law, all prisons are required to provide qualified interpreters for deaf inmates to help them participate in education and self-help classes and communicate with guards. But at SATF, where most of California’s deaf inmates are housed, hard-of-hearing prisoners are regularly denied access to interpreters, according to recent court filings in a long-running disability rights case known as Armstrong v. Brown. ‘With limited access to programs, deaf class members run the risk of serving longer prison sentences,’ wrote attorneys at the Prison Law Office in a statement filed with the court in May.”
Gay is quoted later in the article: “When deaf inmates leave the prison, some also struggle to access interpreters for parole meetings, especially if they live in remote areas. Between August and December 2017, for example, one deaf parolee in California allegedly did not have access to an interpreter for four out of five parole-mandated mental health appointments. He was soon rearrested, according to Gay Crosthwait Grunfeld, a partner at the law firm Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld who argues the lack of interpretation services prevented him from fully taking advantage of his treatment program and may have contributed to his recidivism. ‘It’s the utmost violation of due process I can think of,’ she says . . . ‘We are not discounting how challenging it is,’ says Grunfeld. ‘We are just saying we need to try harder.'”