Former NFL star and pro-life activist Benjamin Watson and Chicago pastor Charlie Dates recently shed light on the correlation between literacy rates and incarceration.
“In Chicago Public Schools, it’s reported that only 40% of elementary school students and 30% of third through eighth graders meet or exceed grade-level reading benchmarks,” Watson, who heads up the The Watson Seven Foundation, said in a recent episode of “The Just Life” podcast.
“It’s probably worse than what you’re reading. And the tie, though, Ben, goes to the prison population,” Dates explained. “If we were to pull similar statistics for the overwhelming majority of people who make up the inmate population in Illinois, I would have a hypothesis, an educated guess, that the challenge of literacy is prevalent there as well.”
Dates explained that low literacy rates lead to increased bad behavior.
“Because what happens is, if a kid can’t read, cannot keep up in class, bad behavior is the next thing that comes. But if that kid is also surrounded by poverty and a family structure that does not give life to that child, then there are but a few options that the kid has to survive,” the pastor shared.
“And very often, even though I think it’s an injustice system, they end up in the quote unquote justice system for matters that could have been alleviated long before,” Dates added.
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According to the World Literacy Foundation, “two-thirds of children who cannot read by fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.”
In America, over 70% of inmates can’t read above a fourth-grade level, and 85% of juveniles are “low literate.”
One inmate, Jeffry Williams, has been in and out of the prison system for nearly 30 years. Williams left home when he was 13 and shortly after entered the system for the first time. Now at 55, he is determined to learn to read so that when he re-enters the world he can provide for himself and his family.
“I don’t have time for prison anymore,” he said. “I have grandkids I haven’t held yet.”
The system has found that educational programs, like the one Williams was in, help inmates return to the population and are 43% less likely to return to prison.
The stark reality is that literacy saves lives. People who can read above a fourth-grade level can keep up in school and tend to have a higher chance of finding a job. Hopefully with people like Watson raising awareness, literacy rates in the US can rise.
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