I had to find these articles for an administrator today, and thought you all might find the information interesting. It's something that is talked about in my profession quite a bit these days (especially by me!).

There are states in the US which are using elementary school test scores to predict future prison needs, primarily because illiteracy is so closely linked to crime.

From _Newsweek_ January 15, 1990, p. 6
In regards to Indiana . . . "Recently appointed corrections commissioner James Aiken will project the number of future cells needed by estimating the number of the state's second graders who are "at risk," i.e. likely to end up as inmates.

From _NCTimes: The Californian_, Oct. 12, 2000. "Program Helps Carlsbad students improve their literacy skills" about a program where the principal is making sure every kid can read before moving into second grade . . . "Ahle said that California prison officials predict the number of prisons they'll need to build by looking at the state's third-grade reading scores."

There are other references, but these are the most striking to me.

Get out there and help kids learn to read! Illiteracy is a serious economic, social and health issue in the United States.

OK - off my soapbox (for now).

CW, are there well-designed, multi-center studies that support this? I'm skeptical, at best. So often government workers make bold assumptions (especially the Indiana one; what is the definition of second-graders at risk?) without backing it with the facts.

I am not saying that reading scores aren't important. Of course they are! And, I think reading to their kids is one of the most things parents can do for their kids' education. When they are read to, children learn to love books, stories, words, reading, and most of all, they are doing it while they bind with their parents. I read to my kids from when they were infants, until they were in in junior high.

It's just that second-graders "at risk" predicting prisoners sounds like pop psychology to me.

I remember reading an article 30 years ago that linked illiteracy with crime. The article, written by a judge, said that about 90% (I think) of prisoners had learning disabilities. I don't remember the percentage of illiteracy, but it was high. The high correlation of learning disabilities and illiteracy to crime should come as no surprise to anyone.

Tinman

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Originally posted by tinman:
The high correlation of learning disabilities and illiteracy to crime should come as no surprise to anyone.

Tinman

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Enron's executives and board members were illiterate?

Given that sophisticated white collar crime hurts many more people, and hurts them more severely, what about a page highlighting the link betweeen higher education and crime?

Good point, Vernon! That whole Enron incident was devastating to many businesses and people.

I see "second-graders at risk" and "people who are illiterate" as comparing apples to oranges, Tinman. I agree with you about "illiteracy." My point is that second-graders (and kids in general) develop and learn at different rates. Sometimes we pigeonhole kids, which I think is a big mistake. I suspect that many "at risk second-graders" are merely late bloomers who have the potential of becoming quite successful in school. Yet, sometimes we instead put them into the "slow" classes and label them. That in itself may account for later failures.

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Originally posted by vernoncompton:
Enron's executives and board members were illiterate?

Given that sophisticated white collar crime hurts many more people, and hurts them more severely, what about a page highlighting the link betweeen higher education and crime?

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You make a good point. White-collar crime is increasing. Let me quote from this New York Times article (from 2002):

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Even as the rate of murder, robbery, assault and other types of violent and property crimes has declined or flattened in the last decade, there has been a marked increase in accounting and corporate infractions, fraud in health care, government procurement and bankruptcy, identity theft, illegal corporate espionage and intellectual property piracy, federal and state officials say.

With increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.
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For one thing, technological advances like the Internet have contributed substantively to the rate of financial crime cases. Equally important, in the last decade demographic changes, like the aging and growing prosperity and education of the population, have played a role.

"What we are seeing in a variety of areas is fraud on the rise at the same time other crimes are going down," said Joseph T. Wells, a former F.B.I. agent and founder of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which trains members of government, corporations and accounting firms in ferreting out fraud. "There are at least two reasons. Crime is largely a factor of age, and fraud is the crime of choice of the older perpetrator, so as the society ages, you have, and should continue to see, an increase in fraud cases.

"A second reason is that the education level of society has come up in the last 20 years, and the message is clear in the mind of the better-educated public that if you want to commit a crime, fraud is the way to go," he added. "The take is better, and the punishment generally is less."
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"While the statistics are hard to come by, we are seeing what appears to be bigger and more frequent frauds," said W. Steve Albrecht, associate dean at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.

"People commit fraud because of three factors: financial pressure, the perception of an opportunity, and rationalizing it as O.K. This is the fraud triangle," he said. "All three of these elements have been increasing. Being at the down part of an economic cycle exacerbates the problem, but we were seeing a lot of it in the good times as well."

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The Institute for Global Ethics summed up the New York Times Report:

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The cause: As educated baby boomers take control of the nation's corporations, some are finding that white-collar crime not only pays quite well, but carries a light penalty if discovered, according to the Times report.

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Two of their other articles (from 2001) are Women Committing More White-Collar Crimes and White-Collar Criminals Face Stiffer Sentences under New Guidelines.

Professor Arie Freiberg, Department of Criminology at the University of Melbourne, preseneted a report titled [i]Sentencing White-collar Criminals" to a Fraud Prevention and Control Conference in 2000. It's available in a 21-page pdf file or 30-page HTML.

We need to combat illiteracy through education for everyone. But this alone won't prevent crime. Crime prevention is a complex subject, but I think instilling a sense of social conscience in people will help.

Tinman

Actually, the most recent linking of literacy and crime I've seen has more to do with finding more effective means of very early childhood education. The Indiana state prison system aside, reading problems greatly determine a person's succes (or failure) in the education system.

Dr. Reid Lyon, NICHD, one of the foremost researchers in this field says here that "reading problems are not confined or defined by intelligence, race, or ethnicity. Children with reading problems will have problems in life." However, because of the strong link between a child's home life and his preparedness to learn to read, "it is important to identify children who are at-risk for or who have reading difficulties earlier [than kindergarten or the primary grades]."

The problem we have with this today is that intervention doesn't start until 3rd or 4th grade, and often the children are so far behind by then that they'll need special programs and significant help for the rest of their educational careers. If we can find ways to influence and encourage families (especially in at-risk neighborhoods) to practice more of those emergent literacy skills at home we'll be going a long way . . . not to stamp out crime, really . . . but perhaps to helping some kids find more fulfilling means of making a living.

The studies that I'm aware of are the ones which show a strong correlation between a child's preparedness for kindergarten and their long-term success in school. Older studies said that not every child was able to learn to read well . . . while newer studies show that, given the emergent literacy skills they need, nearly any child can succeed as a reader. I would also suggest, for support of this, a reading of the lengthy but interesting FACES study to analyze Head Start programs (preschool programs for disadvantaged kids) and how they've helped narrow the gaps, and the Abecedarian study done by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which is a very interesteing longitudinal study.

Now, about the prisons. Even given the recent white collar crime, the rate of illiteracy in prisons is much higher than in society at large. A google search found me [URL=http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/rootsofcrime.shtml [/URL] from 1997.

To be fair, I found this study from the UK that says that in THEIR prisons, the literacy rates reflect the general populace more closely.

Here is another question for pondering . . . is illiteracy really linked to crime, or are they both just symptoms of a larger problem?

The other thing to remember is that white collar criminals rarely go to jail and even if they do, they seem to not do as long a stretch either through sentencing or parole. If you are planning for jails, you would be worrying more about the longer term prisoners, who are more likely to not be white collar criminals.

I'm going to come back to this when I have more time on my hands and less beer in my system. Remember I'm a mathematician by training and this study demonstrates at least two (off the top of my head) and probably more well known statistical and mathematical fallacies.

To begin with showing a statistical correspondence is NOT the same thing as showing a causal link. This is one of the chief bugbears of modern governmental interventionist theory. To give a stupid and trivial example imagine taking a survey of the newspapers people read and the ages at which they die. It's mathematically inevitable that whenever you take the survey one newspaper will have had more people die young than all the others. This doesn't mean that reading that newspaper makes you more likely to die young. It means that the people making the claim have a deeply flawed view of statistics.
As I said, more later.

I believe it was CW who inquired if perhaps the problem was not illiteracy, but that illiteracy was a symptom of a deeper problem. I believe you have hit the nail on the head.

Setting aside children with learning disabilitis such as autism, dyslexia, ADHD, the remaining population of non-readers has a very high incidence of poverty, broken families, absent parenting, etc. Ethics training is lacking; self esteem is poor. And schools make lousy parental substitutes. Most school systems that have attempted to replace parenting in the areas of self esteem and ethics training have failed miserably.

I think you have it right. Illiteracy is merely a symptom of a more serious problem in the child's environment. At risk children have many more problems than just being unable to read.

I remember a study from a few years ago which showed that the prison population had a much higher incidence of serious dental problems. Are we thus going to examine the teeth of all primary school children as a predictor of criminal behavior?

To begin with showing a statistical correspondence is NOT the same thing as showing a causal link.

That is precisely right, Bob. That is why correlational studies, no matter how significant, merely show a relationship. The design of the study and control for extraneous variables can be helpful, but not fail-safe. The only type of studies that show causal relationships are well-designed, randomized, controlled trials (RCTs). Oftentimes people forget that and go about their merry ways making policies and laws that reflect drivel.

Now, there is the concept of preponderance of evidence. That is, well-designed correlational studies, one after another, are all showing the same results. I have mentioned this before, with the best example being smoking studies. Obviously, researchers cannot randomly assign someone to the smoking group, and someone to the non-smoking group, while controlling for all other variables, watching the longitudinal results. That would be unethical. However, preponderance of evidence, in this case, has been enough to convince us of the dangers of smoking.