Now, an interesting question comes to mind here. How many Deaf people get arrested each year? Whether they get arrested for DUI, domestic abuse, failure to appear in court, rape charges whether it's campus rape or not, rioting, protests (remember DPN2 arrests?), drug possesion, trespassing, stalking, vandalism or other more serious crimes. This includes Deaf juveniles such as teens who get arrested. Whatever the reason for the arrests but it'd be nearly impossible to find the average number of Deaf people who get arrested each year because such statistics are extremely hard to find and gather.
In the Sherlock's use of "28 Deaf people arrested" cannot be used as an absolute total number of Deaf people arrested so far this year. For all we know it could be 200 Deaf people arrested. It could be 50. It could be 1,000. Or it could be 10,000! We don't know for sure exactly. And to compound that we have people who are deaf/hh and not Deaf who get arrested each year as well. Although in the past I have blogged before on Deaf prisoners but that's not helpful in what I'm trying to do here.
The number of Deaf people in the U.S. varies between 600,000 to 1,000,000. Let's take a middle number like 800,000 Deaf people in the U.S just for simplicity sake. There are 310,000,000 people in the U.S. The ratio of Deaf people to hearing would be about to 1 out of 400. The number of arrests for all offenses each year for all people using a 2005 statistics from the FBI is approximately 14,000,000 arrests. Despite this it's best to look at the rate of arrests per number of inhabitants.
Nationwide, the 2005 rate of arrests was estimated at 4,761.6 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants..We can expect that some of 4,761 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants (or 0.047 arrest rate) which we can conclude safely that it does include Deaf people that were arrested. When one says "arrest" it doesn't mean convicted, prosecuted, and/or imprisoned. Just arrested for a crime to be booked. Many are released and not face jail time and instead be on probation or pay a penalty fine. Many, if not most, do end up in jail or incarcerated.
Since people are human and the crimes are the same regardless if a person has a hearing loss or not and that we're all equal as far as human frailty is concerned, the rate of arrests nationwide is 0.047 or 4.7 percent. That means we can expect 37,000 arrests out of a Deaf population of 800,000 every year (simple math, 0.047 times 800,000 equals 37,000). Remember, arrests can be for minor charges to the more serious. Some arrests are multiple arrests for the same person. Again, let me stress this to you folks before you go all hyper on me like you usually do. 37,000 arrests DOES NOT MEAN 37,000 Deaf people arrested each year. It means possibly that up to 37,000 arrests on average are expected each year in a Deaf population of 800,000. It'd be impossible to know exactly the average number of Deaf people that get arrested each year but we can make some assumptions on the average number of arrests in a Deaf population. A different thing here. If you are getting angry at this 37,000 arrest number then you need to either re-read what I just wrote or have someone else explain it to you.
Now, having said all that. Since the Deaf population is a recognized minority group that's quite distinct due to its uniqueness as a culture group any high profile arrests of Deaf people that gets splattered across the news headlines will probably get more notice than not. For example, the VRS scam involving many notable Deaf names. And are much more likely to have an impact on the image of the Deaf community than not simply due to its being a recognized and unique minority group.
So, it's rather a gross and rookie mistake to use the "28 Deaf people arrested in a year" to figure out the statistics on the number of Deaf people arrested in a year. Right, DonG? Doing so is nearly an impossible task to try and do in the first place since there is no database that I know of that collect that kind of rather personal and specific information.
