Prisoner literacy: inmate education: prison education: A recent study suggests new prison inmates are more educated than cohorts from a 1992 study, and more of their parents are college-educated. In fact, the literacy scores of Black and Hispanic inmates were higher than those of Black and Hispanic high school dropouts living in society.
The National Center for Education Statistics recently released “Literacy Behind Bars: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey.” The survey was administered to more than 18,000 adults (16 years and older), living in households in America. An additional 1,200 surveys were also dispensed to prison inmates at the state and federal levels, a sample representative of the nearly 1.4 million adults in prison. The measurement tool assessed literacy through straightforward tasks completely by the test taker. Literacy was measured in three categories — prose, document and quantitative literacy — on a scale of 0 to 500.
