If Harper Really Wants to Fight Crime

I know this won't be sexy to someone Conrad Black accuses of having a prison fetish but there are better ways to lower Canada's crime rate than building and filling new prisons.

Here's one - cutting illiteracy.  A report from the Canadian Council on Learning warns that rates of low literacy in Canada could increase by 25% by 2031.   What does that have to do with crime?  Plenty.

The U.S. National Assessment of Adult Literacy finds a direct link between literacy and crime rates in America:

85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.



More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.


Penal institution records show that inmates have a 16% chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70% who receive no help. This equates to taxpayer costs of $25,000 per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders.


Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The [U.S.] Department of Justice states, "The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure." Over 70% of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.

Not that Furious Leader ever lets facts get in the way of his rancid ideology but he (and Canada) would be much better off if he relieved his own crushing ignorance by reading books such as The Spirit Level in which the authors, two epidemiologists, present compelling evidence of the links between income inequality (the wealth gap between rich and poor) and a host of expensive and debilitating social ills including crime and punishment, sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancy, even divorce rates.  
 
Harper would do well to consult Robert Reich and his recent writings on income equality and the role it has played in causing and prolonging the Great Recession in which his America now finds itself trapped.
 
Unfortunately, Harper wants to lead Canada into the 21st century by reinstating the 18th.  

A Literacy Time Bomb

The population of the United States has burgeoned, especially lately, due to legal and illegal immigration. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it's one of the social changes underway in the US that threaten to create a serious reduction in the literacy of its workforce by 2030:

"The decline in literacy is one of the more startling projections in a report that examines what it calls a "perfect storm" of converging factors and how those trends are likely to play out if left unchecked.

"The three factors identified are: a shifting labor market increasingly rewarding education and skills, a changing demographic that include a rapid-growing Hispanic population, and a yawning achievement gap, particularly along racial and socioeconomic lines, when it comes to reading and math.

"The individual trends have been identified before, but this study makes an effort to examine their combined effects, and to project a disturbing future, including a sharply declining middle class in addition to the lost ground in literacy.

"'We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy,' says Irwin Kirsch, a senior research director at ETS and the lead author of the study."

The bad news is that this time bomb seems to be unstoppable. The good news is that there's still time to make real inroads to reduce the problem. All that's missing now is a will to act, something that isn't assured from a government focused on tax cuts and indifferent to the social impacts of its spending.