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 links, poverty and/or crime:
“I’ve gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.”
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist. Baseball the Beautiful, Links Books (1970)
“The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How could passion run so deep
Had I never thought
That the crime of being born
Blackens all our lot?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)