To begin to understand the plight of a deaf prisoner, imagine being sent to prison in a foreign country. You can’t understand what orders guards are yelling at you each night. You can’t tell if a fellow prisoner is calling out a threat to you. You may not even understand exactly how you landed in prison in the first place. For the tens of thousands of deaf people who occupy our prisons, this is their reality.

Reality is a lack of access to communication with families and legal counsel, lack of access to services and programs available to hearing prisoners, the constant threat of abuse from fellow inmates, and the constant threat of punishment from a system that does not understand their disability.

In a population already dismissed by society for its transgressions, who speaks for deaf prisoners? For a long time, no one did, aside from their own families. Until 2007, when a tenacious law intern named Talila Lewis took on the wrongful conviction case of a deaf man in Washington, D.C.