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THE SHACKLES OF ILLITERACY
By
SCOTT CHRISTIANSON, Ph.D.
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 America's
bulging penal complex is crammed with inmates who can't read or write well enough
to find an intersection on a map, apply for a Social Security card, or pen a simple
letter.
Most of them landed in prison from poor neighborhoods, after
they dropped out of failing public school systems, and their illiteracy was an
underlying factor in making them criminals, in part because it barred them from
finding decent employment in post-industrial America.
Prisoners are
four times more likely than the general population to exhibit learning disabilities
and this also interferes with their literacy abilities. A disproportionate number
of prisoners are minorities who come from households where English is not the
spoken language, and this too adversely affects their basic literacy proficiency.
Three-quarters have only a ninth-grade education or less. Most are functionally
illiterate.
These are shocking statistics for a nation that prides itself
as being the most advanced country in the world in the 21st century. Yet prisons
put the lie to many of society's boasts, as much today as ever.
Today's
prisoners aren't forbidden to read and write, or denied reading and writing materials,
as they were in slavery days, but their illiteracy keeps them shackled just the
same.
Locked up, many find themselves trapped in a prison-within-a-prison.
Their inability to read and write bars them from working on their legal case or
exchanging letters with loved ones. It keeps them from enriching their minds or
improving their lot in life. Illiteracy is an invisible ball and chain that holds
them down and keeps them down.
Yet addressing prisoner literacy and
education gets short shrift in the rush to punish criminals.
In the
1940s, one young unschooled prisoner, Malcolm Little, discovered the power of
the written word while incarcerated in a cell in Massachusetts. He became a voracious
reader and was transformed into Malcolm X.
Shortly after his assassination
and the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, prison education
programs throughout the country were bolstered and Congress gave inmates and other
poor people the right to apply for federal financial grants to help pay for their
higher education. The Pell program provided incentives for convicts to pursue
their education and helped thousands of them to take college courses, thereby
increasing their chances of stepping out of prisons revolving door.
Studies
over the years have shown that education makes prisoners less troublesome for
correctional authorities, more likely to become employed upon release, and less
apt to commit crimes, which means that prison education is extremely cost-effective.
That was one reason why, by 1982, 350 prisons had college programs and ten
percent of the nation's inmates were participating in post-secondary education.
But all of that suffered a setback in the 1990s. Although the United States
still showed a functional illiteracy rate about three times higher than that of
the former Soviet Union, and 75 percent of its unemployed were non-readers, efforts
to address illiteracy and poor education among Americas huge prisoner population
were sharply curtailed.
After Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina
and other conservatives portrayed prison education as coddling criminals, Congress
barred prisoners from the federal grant program, prompting an almost total shutdown
of prisoner college education. Other rehabilitation programs were abruptly ended.
As a result, many prison departments cut back on their schooling efforts
and put more reliance on inmate tutors and other volunteers to deliver only the
most rudimentary education.
Sometimes these dedicated workers manage
to do what society's troubled public education bureaucracy has failed to do: teach
criminals to read. Their good works offer a living testament to the power of the
human spirit. And by helping others, peers help themselves as well as society.
Yet supporting programs that help them to help themselves is the least we
can do. Illiterate prisoners represent the end result of many societal failures,
and addressing the root problem of illiteracy would go a long way toward reducing
powerlessness, crime and imprisonment.
Scott Christianson, Ph.D.,
is a senior fellow at Bard College and a former longtime New York State criminal
justice official. He is the author of several books including With Liberty
for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy
Book Award Distinguished Honors. | |
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