Crime and Delinquency

Crime and Deaf People

Like their hearing peers, deaf people have been arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned for an array of crimes. Furthermore, deaf people have also been crime victims. They are a unique population within the justice system. Commentators contend that, although deaf people can be sociopaths, they often commit crimes in a different way than is typically seen with hearing sociopaths. This lack of offender sophistication is highlighted in the literature and is believed to be attributed to uncorrected challenging behaviors, poor school instruction, and other factors.

Roots of Criminal Behavior Among Deaf People

There are several possible causes of criminal behavior among deaf people, including language dysfluency; adverse childhood experiences (such as abuse and neglect); and lack of access to quality, linguistically accessible behavioral health providers and programs. Other entries in this volume address more thoroughly how language inaccessibility during childhood results in undesirable outcomes for deaf adults. However, the importance of language as a protective factor in the development of all people, deaf and hearing, must be underscored. Typically, cognitive functioning and linguistic development are closely related (individuals with strong cognitive functioning generally have strong linguistic ability). However, deaf children are often raised in conditions with little to no access to American Sign Language (ASL), leaving many deaf youth without adequate knowledge and skills for [Page 145]communication. Thus, the natural response to frustration is to use behavior, instead of language, to have their wants and needs met. Compounding problems with language dysfluency is the reality that 40% of deaf people have additional disabilities that result in a variety of challenges, including problems with impulse control, learning difficulties, and brain damage, which may have symptoms that vary from clear and obvious to covert and unapparent.

Deaf youth’s acting-out behavior in school is often met with harsh, zero-tolerance policies, resulting in their removal from the learning environment and placement in more restrictive, punitive programs. At a time when deaf youth desperately need therapeutic intervention, they may be moved away from deaf peers and into the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term coined by Harvard University researchers to refer to the path that resource-poor schools use to punish and isolate students with difficult behaviors. Studies show that, with an estimated 70% of the juvenile justice population having learning disabilities, and 33% of this population reading below the 4th-grade level, students with disabilities are often prime candidates for the school-to-prison pipeline.

Another origin of crime and delinquency among deaf people is adverse childhood experiences, especially child abuse and neglect. Sources report that maltreatment rates among deaf children are two to four times greater than rates among peers without disabilities. Deaf people who cannot communicate effectively with others are found to experience maltreatment with higher frequency. Children and youth who experience maltreatment in childhood show a higher prevalence of mental disorders and risky behaviors. Commentators on the psychology of deafness have concluded that a higher incidence of imprisonment of deaf people is predictable, either because they engage in criminal activity, sometimes under coercion, or because they cannot participate in defending themselves against accusations of criminal activities.

...