What an awesome way to improve the lives and outlooks of prisoners! As teachers, we know that reading can inspire and change lives, but how many of us attribute that same level of caring to prison wardens?
For many of our students, school can be their prison. What if we allowed more students an “independent study” style salvation from school in the form of reading and reporting?
Alternatively, how many of our students may eventually drop out and end up in jails? Research suggests that that dropouts are eight times more likely to wind up incarcerated than their graduating peers. When so many youths are dropping out and winding up in the penal system, anything that gets them to read and enrich their minds, continuing their education, is bound to not only improve their lives, but improve their prospects of staying out of future jail time.
Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.
I think this is a brilliant initiative and I sincerely hope that many other countries follow the same path.
