Prison Literacy: Implications for Program and Assessment Policy.

educators. In states where other ethnic groups, e.g., vorious Asian-Americans who are not native speakers of English are statisticallysignificant in prisonse.g., Hawaii, 44.4%, California, 4.8 %; andColorado, Nevada, Utah, and the federal system (all above 2%)prison educators are required who can teach effectively in amulticultural environment, even though the smaller numbers poseless of a problem than does the growing number of Hispanics(Camp & Camp, 1990, p. 5; Dillingham, 1991, p. 66).Following the lead of New Mexico and Texas, the federal systembegan to address the bilingual needs of its Hispanic residents in1973 when a study revealed that about 18.5% of the total federalinmate population had Spanish surnames, but only 2.5% of thefederal staff was bicultural or bilingual (McCollum, 1978).Thereafter, California and New York initiated programs in bilingualand bicultural education (Hamilton, 1985; Castro, 1977, 1981;Hispanic Inmate Needs, 1986).2The Texas D.O.C. guide for teaching illiterate and non-Englishspeakinginmates provides a recommendation for anindividualized approach in the use of proficiency tests foridentifying an inmate's needs (Brown, 1973). In both New York andNew Jersey, as is also the case with African-Americans, the failure ofpublic-school education to help Hispanics achieve full literacy hasbeen cited as a contributive factor to their criminal behavior(Sainz & Biggins, 1979). In a Connecticut prison where theauthorities and most of the inmates all spoke English, the radioprograms were all in English, and the loud-speaker invariably gavecommands in English, the Spanish-speaking Puerto Riquetiosviewed themselves as symbolically imprisoned by the Englishlanguage (Pinton, 1978). In view of the increasing numbers anddiversity of incarcerated Hispanics from all over Latin Americaduring the 1980s, we found research and reporting on the progressof bilingual education in prison to be especially meager.4. N ATIVE-AMERICANSWhereas bilingual education of non-native-English speakers ismerely inadequate, and the prison education of African-Americansis an agony, the educational situation of Native-American inmatesis a human tragedy and quite consistent with the immigrantAmerican's historic antipathy towards the encountered native.Whereas the Native-American population at well under two millionis but 0.6-to-0.7% of our total population, Native-Americans werereported to be 3.8% of the total prison inmate population in 1990(Camp & Camp, 1990, p. 5). Proportionally speaking, Native-12 TECHNICAL REPORT TR93-124