The Importance Of Education In Prison

Caroline Ed had a baby at 13 and dropped out of school. She's was unemployed for five years after she lost her job as a maid. Ed, 53, relied on food stamps, and her daughter paid her rent. Eventually her daughter went off to college and Caroline was on her own , she turned to a life of crime. She desperately needed money, and decided one day to rob a bank with a gun she had stolen from the home she earlier in the day had broken into.Caroline Ed ended up getting arrested , where she would soon end up in prison. What she, and many others are unaware of is that crime and literacy rates are inversely related, which is why many prison inmates are illiterate.
To start with, there is not even close to enough education in state prisons! The NAAL reported

This means that we are rapidly gaining more and more people in prisons, and not only that but a lot of them are illiterate. According to The Innocence project and staff calculations, the average state prison gets about $42,843 annually (N1). If they focused less on certain things and more on their education, they would always have the money for educational classes for inmates.”In 2004, less than a third of prisoners had access to prison education at any one time”. If the inmates have bad literacy when they enter prison, nothing will change if they don’t get the educational help that they

The GAO say that,” Almost as many people are enrolled in education and job-training programs as are waiting to get into them”(S1). The problem with that is , most prisoners so not stay there entire sentence in prison or in one single prison. Once there transferred to another prison or let out for good behavior they more than likely won’t continue worrying about education, or it will take a very long time to get accepted into the educational classes in prison. Most prisons either have too many enroll for the educational classes or not enough.Federal prisoners with subpar reading skills can't even get into basic literacy classes. The U.S. has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in china (k3), and China has a WAY bigger population than the U.S .Because being literate has such an impact on someone's life, this is a major problem all around the board. Literacy skills important in prisons because: inmates often must fill out forms to make requests, letters are a vital link with the outside world, some prison jobs require literacy skills, and reading is one way to pass time behind