Literacy Program for Inmates to Be Offered at 2 Branch Jails : Reading: The pilot series is in response to a recent study that found 82% of the county’s prisoners functionally illiterate.

Inmates at two county branch jails can register next month for a pilot reading program that will attempt to correct widespread illiteracy among the county jail population, a spokeswoman of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said Monday.

The Working for Inmate Literacy Now program will be tested at the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange and the James A. Musick Branch Jail in Irvine for six months, then it will be brought to the county’s three other jail facilities, said Mercedez Julian, education supervisor of correctional programs unit for the Sheriff’s Department.

The pilot program was created in the wake of a study completed this year that found 82% of county prisoners are functionally illiterate. Officials ran the study to find out if inmates are able to read well enough to take educational and vocational classes already being offered at the jails, Julian said.

In the study, 990 inmates from all five jails were tested, about 20% of the average daily census. The testing and the pilot program were created with the help of READ/Orange County, a literacy program from the Orange County Public Library.

Some written exams were given, but as part of the literacy sampling, READ volunteers also tried simple oral tests such as giving prisoners a medicine label and asking them how they would administer a dosage to a 4-year-old child, said Scott Cheney, READ’s literacy coordinator.

About 82% could not do it, making them functionally illiterate. Among those who knew English, about 53% could not understand what they read. Among the rest, 16% needed training in English as a second language and 13% could not read at all.

Those running the program said that inmates need to be able to read to get a job and function in society. In addition, officials believe that teaching inmates basic reading skills might encourage them to sign up for more literacy classes when they are released.

“That will lead to more options for that person,” Julian said, “and one of those options will prevent that person from coming back to jail. That’s the theory.”

The pilot program’s goal is to teach basic reading skills to 500 inmates, she said.

Next month, officials will do one-on-one interviews at the two jails to see which prisoners need basic reading skills. Theo Lacy has about 900 inmates and James A. Musick has about 1,000, Julian said.

With the constant turnover at the facilities--the average stay of an inmate at a county jail is 58 days--orientation interviews will be done on a daily basis, she said.

Once a prisoner has chosen to register for the pilot program, a volunteer from READ will be matched to meet with the inmate for two hours twice a week, Julian said. Each inmate will be re-tested every five weeks.

“We know there is a high turnover in jail,” Cheney said, “but the idea is not to get them to the point of being literate, but to plant (the idea) so that they will want to become literate.”

READ’s involvement with jail inmates is only one of several current programs by the Orange County Public Library. Last month, the library launched a series of free workshops to train community volunteers how to be literacy tutors.

A landmark study released by the U.S. Department of Education last month revealed that nearly half of American adults possess the barest of language and math skills--although the majority of them believe they can read or write English well.

In Orange County, READ officials say that an estimated 700,000 adults are either functionally illiterate or able to read and write but limited in their skills.