Links With Poverty and Crime
In developed countries, the level of functional literacy of an individual is proportional to income level and risk of committing crime. For example, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics in the United States::
- Over 60% of adults in the US prison system read at or below the fourth grade level
- 85% of US juvenile inmates are functionally illiterate
- Adult inmates who received educational services while in prison had a 16% chance of returning to prison, as opposed to 70% for those who received no instruction.
- 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.
According to begintoread.com :
- Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
- Three out of four individuals who receive food stamps read on the two lowest levels of literacy.
- 16-to-19-year-old girls at the poverty line and below with below-average reading skills are 6 times more likely to have out-of-wedlock children than their more literate counterparts.
Read more about this topic: Functional Illiteracy
Famous quotes containing the words poverty and crime, links with, links, poverty and/or crime:
“... what’s been building since the 1980’s is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That’s what will last after this flurry on family values.”
—Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.”
—Brian Friel (b. 1929)
“Remember that it’s never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country... You better slip me the dough.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)