A cop reads crime’s signs

The News Virginian
Published: November 19, 2008

The library burns, and to the arsonist the poet turns: “Have you forgotten that your liberator is the book? The book is your wealth! It is knowledge. Right, truth, virtue, duty, progress, reason dissipating all madness. And you, you destroy that!” The arsonist responds: “I don’t know how to read.”

Illiteracy ensures neither crimes “unheard of,” such as setting fire to a library, as happened in Victor Hugo’s 1782 poem “The Terrible Year,” nor a life of crime for the poor soul who knows nothing of reading’s simple joys. But among precursors to such turns for the worse, illiteracy flashes like neon.

Of the more than 1.4 million men and women who awoke this morning to the cold reality of another day in prison, more than two-thirds are functionally illiterate, that is unable to read or write simple sentences, unable to form thoughts from the black marks on these pages. This represents a medium of communication foreign to them, like the language of steady work or the word yes from a potential employer.

Waynesboro police Sgt. Mark Kearney, the city’s crime prevention officer, knows the statistics and the metaphors, and with a cop’s disdain for gray hues, sees no coincidences. If the ranks of people unable to read grow, so too will the police department’s arrest rolls. Rather than wait for such trends to bloom, Kearney endeavors to circumvent them.

Four years ago, he founded the Book ‘Em literacy project, an annual book fair that, among other things, delineates the link between illiteracy and crime. Kearney and more than a dozen others in his department have taken time to read to hundreds of elementary school classes. The effort has blossomed into a nonprofit foundation that has taken root elsewhere. Lebanon, N.H., and Charleston County, S.C., both have stepped under the Book ’Em umbrella, hosting book fairs and coordinating literacy campaigns.

Kearney on Tuesday received an honor richly deserved: he was among 11 local people recognized with a Dawbarn Education Award for contributions to education. His work has been that of attacking a problem too many people prefer to ignore in an era when the virtual allure of video games has seized the power to transfix minds while dulling them.

Almost a fourth of Americans are functionally illiterate, according to federal statistics. In Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, the rate is more than a third. Former Vanderbilt University education professor Chester E. Finn Jr. several years ago added context to the numbers: “Just five percent of seventeen-year-old high school students can read well enough to understand and use information found in technical materials, literary essays and historical documents.”

As a people, Americans consistently have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to be unruffled by seeming crisis, the most telling recent evidence, the swift march back into routine following the 2001 terrorist attacks. This has served the country, providing the mettle for a psyche almost unshakable. But Americans would do well to be ruffled by the brimming crisis of illiteracy, which corresponds to other maladies. Sgt. Kearney has measured the cost and is seeking to subtract from it. The rest of us should pay his calculations heed.