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 with, links, poverty and/or crime:
“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)
“Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.”
—Eleonora Duse (1859–1924)
“You know what? Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)