Are illiterate inmates a high security risk for the U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)?
My observations support an affirmative answer. Illiteracy should require an inmate to be in a high security prison (or possibly a medical facility). These inmates need to be confined and programmed (provided evidence-based instruction) with greater care than other inmates of a lower classification; illiteracy makes them a serious danger. They are a risk to a more general prison population (i.e., ones with a lower security profile) and should only be released from high security classification when they can pass a literacy exam, at the third-grade level or higher. Currently, illiteracy is an ignored security risk, yet it degrades every tool for managing inmates and assures dysfunction in all BOP operations, including communications to inmates. Those who would suggest oral communications and graphics allow reasonably safe operations and communications when illiterate inmates are in the population are ignoring reality.
Where do illiterate inmates come from? They do not reflect any particular geographic area but, in this current era, the following facts are consistently present:
- Their non-incarcerated life was in a community within the United States where it was a violation of law to not have a minor enrolled and attending school; they grew up, around nominal adults, breaking laws that directly applied to them.
- Before committing the crimes that brought them to federal prison, family members, or adults responsible for them when they were minors, were actively violating truancy and child welfare laws. Quality literacy may require good schools, but illiteracy reflects not attending school or school officials who create fraudulent records.
- The issue of not being “given an opportunity to learn” is never the case; they (and those influencing them) have actively refused or avoided education and have been willing to violate the law to accomplish this avoidance.
If one were to create an objective definition of what makes an offender a career criminal (a history of violative conduct), illiteracy confirms an individual as a career criminal.
This immediate and unaddressed risk was crystallized in my experiences attempting to facilitate (I would not suggest I am a trained teacher) the literacy attempts of two inmates I will call Griff and Jim. Griff wants to learn how to read and write and is making slight, but measurable, progress. Nevertheless, he remains incapable of reading basic instructions and is a walking drone for any manipulative inmate. He can neither protect himself or others from his actions; he never has a clue whether he is following or ignoring instructions or rules. On the day an inmate seeks to use Griff for activity in violation of the rules, he is an obvious target. Additionally, Griff, as most adult illiterates, has a history of being pathologically dishonest; he often guesses what the right response is based on what he interprets as the expectations of others. He is practiced at being dishonest, even if recently he has been forthright in his desire to become literate. Griff, as an illiterate inmate, is uniquely dangerous specifically because of his illiteracy.
Jim is the more common illiterate inmate and the more obviously dangerous. He continues to actively conceal his inability to read and write. In fact, Jim is likely to act in a violent manner if, in certain settings, his ignorance is exposed. He would see such public disclosure as “putting his business out there” based on the nonsensical concept that his illiteracy is not obvious to all. Further, he will seek to participate in various inmate classes that require literacy to create a positive inmate record; each of these efforts will require fraud involving other inmates and, at times, BOP staff for him to secure credit for such classes. Like rotting flesh in a kitchen, he degrades any attempts at productive activity for himself and others in that environment. Jim is a menace, brings out misconduct in others, and putting him in any prison population below high security is a degradation of any education programming and operationally unsafe.
Illiterate inmates can never be anywhere but a high security BOP institution until they are no longer illiterate. The obvious security risks go beyond the ones outlined in the descriptions of these two inmates.
In the final analysis, adult illiteracy may also reflect some level of mental illness and definitely tracks with the inability to follow multi-step instruction. Is there a more appropriate way to classify the condition of adult illiteracy? Possibly, but the danger remains.
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