U.S. Prisons to Stress Literacy Programs : Education: Inmates will be required to read at 12th-grade level. Those who reject training will be disciplined or lose benefits.

The federal prison system, moving to reduce illiteracy in its swelling population, is launching an aggressive effort to raise inmates’ required reading ability from eighth to 12th grade.

Prisoners who refuse to take reading classes when they test below the high school graduate level will lose benefits inside the institutions or face discipline under the program announced Wednesday by Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh.

But Thornburgh and federal Bureau of Prisons officials stressed positive aspects of the effort, contending that prison literacy programs have been well received by both staff and prisoners.

Inmates “have readily accepted our new approach,” Thornburgh said in a speech to an international conference on literacy and corrections in Ottawa, Canada. “For most who cannot read, competing in the legitimate work world is impossible.”

He added, “We believe there is a straight-line relationship between literacy levels and an individual’s likelihood of involvement in substance abuse.” Basic literacy “not only helps the prisoner after release but, equally important, contributes to a better life while in prison and to a safer environment for both staff and inmates.”

Raising the literacy standard for the nation’s 58,000 federal prisoners drew a mixed reaction from organizations active in the literacy field.

“One does not mandate education and literacy for adults,” said Mike Fox, director of Push Literacy Action Now, a Washington-based group that works in literacy training and advocacy.

“I would hope the program is incentive-based and not punitive,” said Rene Woodward, an associate at Southport Institute, a Connecticut-based research organization that sponsors the Project on Adult Literacy. “I don’t know if you can force even children to learn.”

About 20% of all federal inmates are illiterate, Thornburgh said, using the standard of eighth grade as a benchmark.

Although this rate “mirrors closely the illiteracy level of the general population in the United States, we in the Justice Department are not content to allow men and women in our custody to leave prison only meeting the general norm,” he said. “We are committed to giving prisoners the opportunity to better equip themselves for positive change, if they so desire.”

The attorney general said that professionals in the corrections field no longer subscribe to the so-called “medical model,” under which prison staff members prescribe programs expected to cure an inmate of criminality.

But this does not remove the need for “effective motivational components . . . that induce inmates to participate in what we see are critically interconnected life-skill programs, such as literacy and work.”

Work assignments and literacy are the only two mandatory programs in the federal prison system, Thornburgh said.

The literacy program in the Bureau of Prisons began in the early 1980s with a sixth-grade literacy standard, which was later raised to eighth grade. The standard will be raised again “very shortly.”

Failure to work toward attaining literacy could be a negative factor in deciding a prisoner’s eligibility for moving outside prison to a half-way house during the last six months of his term, Gregory Bogdan, a prison bureau spokesman, said.

Similarly, it could result in an inmate’s drawing the lowest rate of pay--44 cents an hour, instead of $1.05, the top hourly rate--for work inside the institution, according to Bogdan.

The number of teachers and educational administrators in the nation’s 72 federal institutions has increased from 286 in 1986 to 559 in fiscal 1990, Bogdan said.

Thornburgh noted that last year 10,546 inmates completed eighth-grade literacy requirements; 3,100 earned high school equivalency diplomas, 7,356 completed post-secondary education courses and more than 11,000 finished occupational training programs.

“We are awarding (high school equivalency) diplomas to individuals who never before succeeded at anything they tried,” Thornburgh said. “We are graduating some prisoners as college-level scholars who couldn’t read or write when they came into the institution.”