Escaping Illiteracy : Education: Volunteers teach county jail inmates to read, often instilling a desire to continue lessons after release.

They came after a long day at their regular jobs, ready for more work. Their tools this weeknight varied from People magazine to Reader’s Digest to a literacy assessment test.

The three volunteers were from READ/Orange County, a literacy program of the Orange County Public Library. Their clients are inmates at the James A. Musick Jail.

The tutors and students are part of a 2-month-old pilot project aimed at teaching inmates how to read. The program, Working for Inmate Literacy Now, was created soon after a 1993 study found that 82% of county prisoners are functionally illiterate in English, officials said.

“Because of the constant turnover in the jail population, we know it’s hard to get them to be completely literate before their release,” said Carol Ball, a 49-year-old resident of Costa Mesa who is a field services coordinator for READ. “Our goal is not to teach them to read and write, but to teach them that they can.”

Researchers tested 990 inmates at all five county jails, about 20% of the average daily population, said Mercedez Julian, education supervisor of the correctional programs unit for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Of those who spoke English, about 53% could not understand what they read, she said. Another 16% did not speak or read English as a first language and 13% could not read in any language.

Tuesday night at Musick, volunteer Susan Landis, a 25-year-old office manager from Newport Beach, said she chose the People magazine to help her student, 19-year-old Angel, because “it keeps his attention.”

Angel said he has learned more from his eight weekly sessions with Landis than from 12 years in school. The inmates’ last names were not revealed to protect their privacy.

“It’s a one-to-one deal, so I’m focused on what I have to do,” Angel said. “In a classroom, there are so many distractions.”

In their previous sessions, Landis and Angel have used other magazines and even horoscopes as learning tools, Landis said. All tutors are encouraged to personalize the sessions to make the students feel comfortable.

“A lot of adults learn differently,” noted Ball, who said she is dyslexic and did not learn how to read until she was 30.

Because the average stay of an county jail inmate is 58 days, some students who have had only a few reading sessions before leaving jail have asked for READ contacts in the outside world, said READ literacy coordinator Scott Cheney.

“The success is that they’re here and want to learn,” Cheney said. “And it’s great when they want to continue the lessons after being released.”

The pilot program will run for four more months at Musick and the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange. After that, it will be offered in the system’s three other jails, Julian said.

Sheriff’s Department officials decided to research literacy in their jail system after discovering that many inmates could not read well enough to take educational and vocational classes they were already offering.

The study included written exams and some simple oral tests, such as giving prisoners a label from a medicine bottle and asking them how they would administer a dose of medication to a child. Few could accomplish the task.

Before the pilot program began in January, officials conducted one-on-one interviews at the two jails. Theo Lacy has about 900 inmates and Musick has nearly 1,000, Julian said.

Once a prisoner decided to register for the pilot project, a volunteer from READ was matched to meet the inmate for two hours a week.

Because space is limited to trailers at the jails, five students at Musick and four at Lacy are currently enrolled in the program, Cheney said. Each jail has two more inmates on waiting lists.

“We didn’t want to have too many people on waiting lists because we don’t know when we’d have spaces open,” he said. “We didn’t want anyone to be waiting and then they’d get released before getting a tutor.”

Cheney said the program could offer more instruction if daytime tutors were available.

Floyd, a 20-year-old inmate working with Scott Dolan of Newport Beach, said he had been in special education classes all his life and did not learn anything because “the teacher did all my work for me. And there was no homework. Can you believe that?”

The pair has had two sessions, and Floyd said he wanted to continue the lessons for the two remaining weeks of his sentence. He also said that he wants to learn with READ volunteers after his release.

“Reading will help me with life,” he said.