Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency

A particularly clear example of the dynamics hypothesized to cause the correlation can be found in Michael S. Brunner’s monograph, Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through Research-Based Reading Instruction, United States Department of Justice (June 1992). Brunner’s recent book Retarding America, written as a Visiting Fellow for the U.S. Department of Justice, is recommended. A growing body of documentation ties illiteracy causally to violent crime. A study by Dennis Hogenson titled Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency (Reading Reform Foundation) attempted to correlate teenage aggression with age, family size, number of parents present in home, rural versus urban environment, socio-economic status, minority group membership, and religious preference. None of these factors produced a significant correlation. But one did. As the author reports, "Only reading failure was found to correlate with aggression in both populations of delinquent boys." An organization of ex-prisoners testified before the Sub-Committee on Education of the U.S. Congress that in its opinion illiteracy was an important causative factor in crime "for the illiterate have very few honest ways to make a living." In 1994 the U.S. Department of Education acknowledged that two-thirds of all incarcerated criminals have poor literacy.