Young Offenders Learn ABCs the Hard Way: Caged

Rudy Hendley Jr. started frying his brain with the hallucinogenic drug PCP at the age of 12. He figures that’s one reason he’s still learning to read at the age of 19, from inside a steel mesh cage.

“It messed up my brain and stuff,” said Hendley, a robber from Watts who is a ward at the California Youth Authority’s Preston facility outside Sacramento.

“If I wouldn’t have ever messed with that PCP, I would have been reading by now and I would have been graduated and I might would have been in college or something like that.”

Instead, Hendley is confined about 22 hours a day to a one-person cell, punishment for fighting with other inmates. For school, he and others in the lock-down unit are brought in handcuffs to one of four cages--40 inches wide by 40 inches deep. The young men are confined to the pens during their lessons to prevent them from attacking one another.

Designed to fit a school desk, the cages provide a shocking reminder of the strong correlation between academic failure and criminal behavior. They also are testimony to the lengths the youth authority will go to teach its wards to read.

“They’re never out of school, even if we have to teach them through the [cell] door and in leg irons,” said Dorinne Davis, who is in charge of education programs for the youth authority. “It makes kids understand that you’re going to have to get into the educational process to survive here.”

Last spring, the youth authority adopted a policy of not recommending parole for any ward who has not earned a high school diploma or passed the test for the GED, the high school equivalency exam. The policy affects most of the youth authority’s 8,400 prisoners, because 70% of them are serving sentences to age 25.

But to achieve that much schooling, many of the wards first must learn to read. A quarter of the 7,000 inmates in the youth authority schools qualify for special education, most of them because of their poor reading skills. In California’s public schools, only 10% of the students require special education.

Of the 1,400 rapists, murderers, robbers, drug dealers and other criminals sent to the youth authority by courts in the last year, 50% were reading at less than a seventh-grade level though they averaged 17 years of age. Two-thirds of the wards at Preston read at less than a ninth-grade level.

The numbers are worse in adult prisons nationally.

The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey, the latest available, found that two-thirds of adult prisoners were not able to write a letter explaining a billing error or extract information from the average sports-page story.

But studies show that literacy programs in prisons can pay big dividends--often producing faster gains than do intensive programs in the public schools.

One reason is that prison authorities can offer tangible rewards to those who do homework and make progress--extra TV time, telephone calls and even an earlier bid at freedom. Another is that, in juvenile facilities, corrections officials provide the structure that youths often lacked in their homes. Finally, there’s the lack of alternatives.

“It’s about the only thing you can really do to keep yourself occupied,” said a 16-year-old ward from Fresno, who said he first got in trouble for pushing a child off the monkey bars in kindergarten.

When he came into the system, he was reading at a first-grade level. A year later, he has become an avid fan of fantasy novels.

In 1991, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began requiring inmates to attend classes until they had achieved a 12th-grade reading level or had obtained a GED. There is no such requirement in California, where half of the adult inmates read at less than a sixth-grade level.

Federal officials report that the more education inmates receive, the more likely they are to find a job on the outside and the less likely they are to take drugs--inside of prison or out.

Literacy Programs Reduce Recidivism

Interest in promoting literacy as a way of breaking the cycle of criminal behavior is growing. A new law goes into effect in January that will allow courts in downtown Los Angeles and Inglewood to require nonviolent felons to enroll in a reading class as a condition of probation.

A report to Congress in 1993 estimated that high-quality literacy programs reduced the recidivism rate among juveniles by 20% or more.

“If they don’t leave with at least the basic education . . . we’re guaranteeing failure,” said Francisco J. Alarcon, director of the youth authority.

Under Alarcon’s leadership, the authority in January 1997 created an education branch and appointed Davis, a longtime teacher, to head it. The system began requiring wards to take classes they needed for high school graduation--not just recreation courses--and began upgrading its schools to gain accreditation. In addition, the system established schools to serve those who have been paroled but still need credits.

Not everyone backs the investment in education--which accounts for $5,400 out of the $36,000 spent each year to incarcerate each ward. But, Alarcon said, “if we don’t do something, they’re going to be back out there and there’ll be more victims.”

Recidivism rates, he said, have fallen to the lowest level in almost 20 years--a still disheartening 49% for males and 25% for females.

Many Youths Lack Rudimentary Skills

Preston, about 40 miles southeast of Sacramento, is one of 11 youth authority institutions. Most of Preston’s 700 wards live in dormitories scattered among the oak trees on the 55-acre hillside campus.

At 8 a.m. each school day, the young men, all with closely trimmed hair and wearing blue denim pants and shirts, march silently to class, single file in lanes painted on the pavement.

Preston’s school is called James A. Wieden High School, in memory of a teacher who was killed by inmates in the 1930s. Most of the classrooms look like those in regular public schools, except for the thick panes of plexiglass protecting the computer screens.

The school has a library, auto shop, reading lab, horticulture program and band room in addition to its regular classrooms.

For most, reading difficulties started early, often rooted in or compounded by abusive or absent parents, poverty, language difficulties or learning disabilities.

A 17-year-old convicted in a home invasion robbery at the age of 13 in San Diego County said he had trouble reading from the time he entered school.

“I would try to, like, sound it out and it didn’t come out and the teacher would tell you, ‘It’s not like that’ and I try it again and I’d just, like, give up.”

His parents couldn’t help him because they didn’t speak English. Only later, he said, long after he had begun ditching school, did he get help with the sounds of the letters from teachers in juvenile hall. He said he was “too embarrassed” to ask for help earlier.

Reading researchers have identified the typical pattern of failure. First-graders who fail to make the connection between letters and their sounds are able to keep up for a while by guessing at words from the pictures and surrounding words. As the vocabulary in their reading assignments becomes more complex, however, those strategies begin to fail them.

That describes the downward arc of Hodari Benson’s educational career. Benson, now 18, said he was doing fine until the fifth grade. Then, however, schoolwork became too difficult and he began cutting class for weeks at a time.

“I used to be the class clown because I couldn’t read,” said Benson, who was 12 when he was first arrested, for joy riding. “It was like every fourth or fifth word and you don’t know it, and you read on and off, on and off.”

Benson, like many others in the youth authority, first got in trouble with the law when he hit adolescence. The emotional turmoil that all children encounter at that age is even worse for those experiencing academic difficulty. That makes them more vulnerable, authority officials say, to peer pressure to do drugs, skip school and even commit crimes.

“They haven’t read, they haven’t had the exposure to any adult figure speaking in words other than street talk,” said Gloria Brewer, one of Benson’s youth authority teachers.

As a result, they never become familiar with the vocabulary of written text--which uses a far greater variety of words than does oral language.

Brewer said she doesn’t have a strict program for teaching reading. Instead, she tries to find books that are easy to read but that will interest her students. Then she helps them when they get stuck.

As with public school teachers, educators in the youth authority have to deliver the content expected of traditional high school courses to 18- and 19-year-olds who read at a second- or third-grade level.

Many need phonics lessons, said Carol MacGinnis, who sits between two cages in the lock-down unit, teaching two wards at once. She also teaches them words such as “said” and “the,” which most children memorize in the first grade.

Another strategy is to have the wards tell her stories of life on the street, which she transcribes to make a text for them to read. “Sometimes it hurts a lot” to read them, she said. “You think, this isn’t life. Or it shouldn’t be.”

Convincing these youths that they can learn is a big challenge. That’s why assistance is often given in small groups--or by peers.

Enormous Task for Educators

The magnitude of the task is apparent at a round table where reading specialist Koji Sonoyama helps three young men.

The ward at Sonoyama’s right elbow is reading from a civics book about the political dynamics of a mayoral election in New York City. But he doesn’t quite understand what he has read. So Sonoyama tells him to bring over the dictionary.

After looking up the words “reconcile” and “conciliatory,” the ward exults: “Oh, yeah! They’re saying he was the guy they thought could work things out.”

On Sonoyama’s left, another ward, from Richmond, is struggling over an essay about his criminal history. “I became a gang member when I was 16teen,” his essay begins. “I was gang . . . “

He stops. “I need help on that word--banging--is that it?” he asks. Sonoyama helps him spell it.

Across the table, an 18-year-old from Oakland who dealt drugs and committed robbery is working on words that end in “-ful.” Before he came to the youth authority, he said, he could barely read street signs and he had never been to high school.

“I heard that’s the best part of life,” he said, as if going to high school were an exotic adventure.

“I think they were discouraged by their lack of learning, and maybe they started to believe that they couldn’t learn,” Sonoyama said. “That’s one thing I bring to this class--the rebirth of that sense that they can learn and be OK.”

Marlon Crawford, an 18-year-old serving a sentence for assault, has recaptured that enthusiasm for learning. Although assigned to the lock-down unit, he has earned his way to trusty status. Earlier, he was inside the cage. Now he tutors his fellow wards--including Rudy Hendley--from outside.

“When he works with me, he reads through the words and tries to sound them out, and when he sounds them out and gets them correct, he looks up at me and just smiles at me, like ‘Thank you,’ ” Crawford said. “That makes me feel like I’m on top of the world.”

Hendley was part of the general population at Preston and could have been released last spring. But then he got into a fight in the shower, explaining: “I got jumped in the shower by Bloods. I’m a Crip.”

That got him sent to the lock-down unit. Some of the 60 inmates there are confined because they are suicidal or uncontrollably violent. That group is not allowed even to go to the cages. They are taught through the cells’ food slots.

Two of the cages sit in the corners of a room that, like most classrooms, displays the California flag. There is a poster of Malcolm X. The other two cages are located in a room one floor below.

An instructor sits outside each cage. Assignments and books are passed through a square opening.

As Hendley sat behind the mesh this past week, he listened to his teacher, Ginny Johnson, read a simple novel. When he became confused, he interrupted with a question. As he did, he pointed at the book, extending a long, slim finger through the cage’s only opening.

He is due to be released in 2000. He knows he won’t have his diploma by his release date.

“When I get out, I hope to get all my credits and stuff at adult school,” said Hendley.

He has far to go, however. Hendley reads at a first-grade level.

NEW READING PAGE: Starting today, The Times each Sunday will provide information and tips on teaching children to read, including recommended books and a forum for issues. B2