Public school funding structures will be adjusted to cover salaries for the 1,300 or so literacy coaches. Those school-based coaches will also be supported by additional, highly trained literacy coaches assigned to the state’s 16 Regional Education Service Agencies—including leadership literacy coaches who will work specifically with principals and superintendents. All this is because state officials agree that teachers aren’t equipped to fix literacy shortfalls all by themselves. 

“Our number-one priority in the House this session has been literacy,” House Speaker Jon Burns (R) said, according to Atlanta News First. “When you drill down into this budget, it uplifts every community and every citizen across our state.”

Perhaps not every community. The new budget approved by the House includes an increase of $101 million for the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC), with $34.9 million for hiring more correctional officers, but only $800,000 is slotted for vocational training.

Research show that prisoners who participate in educational programming prior to release are less likely to be reincarcerated later. Perhaps a state as invested in rehabilitation as Georgia claims to be could scrape together the funds for a few dozen trained literacy coaches, for the warehouses where it collects all the adults who never properly learned to read. In the 30-plus years I’ve been incarcerated in GDC, most of the vocational instructors I’ve known have been former corrections officers, many of them retired and filling part-time positions that failed to attract any actual experts.

An estimated 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level.

By the most widely used estimates, around 70 percent of the United States prison population can’t read at a fourth-grade level. Literacy instruction inside prisons is limited, caught between teacher shortages and security protocols that always override everything else. GDC has a remedial literacy program for prisoners who read below a fifth-grade level. But it’s easy for people to languish there.

Without fifth-grade reading skills, prisoners are not able to get into the Adult Basic Education classes, which in theory prepare them to take the GED test. When someone enters the prison system without a GED, counselors will tell them that their case plan includes getting their GED as a prerequisite for parole. So not only does a low literacy level make someone more likely to end up in prison, it’ll keep them there longer, too.

When presenting the bill to the House in February, Rep. Chris Erwin (R) said that after the initial K-3 push there are plans to expand to higher grade levels in the public school system. But again, no mention of the other large state system that might benefit from such investment.

In the most recently available data from the Nation’s Report Card, Georgia’s fourth graders were exactly on par with the national average for reading skills. But what that really represents is Black and Hispanic students scoring lower, and white students scoring higher. There’s no mention of this in HB 1193, or the fact that fourth-graders grow up to be adults who are under- or overrepresented in the state prison system. Low literacy in childhood leads to dropping out of high school, which increases the likelihood of incarceration. Not that any legislators are touting the budget as a proactive investment in prison reform.

Georgia lawmakers are investing tens of millions of dollars in early childhood reading programs because they recognize that literacy shapes a person’s future opportunities. Many incarcerated adults passed through those same classrooms years earlier without reaching that milestone. By the time they enter prison, the impacts of their educational lapse have them ready to make the best of a bad situation, if only there were means to do so. 

When education was neglected in childhood, common sense dictates that education should be the foundation of rehabilitation in adulthood.

Image via Nebraska Department of Corrections

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If enacted, over the next six years H2825 would appropriate $60 million from the Department of Justice for a new grant program funding correctional library services. The version that sponsor Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO) introduced in 2023 picked up 45 Democrat cosponsors and a lot of stakeholder support, but was never advanced out of committee. 

“America’s correctional system is far too often focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation. The Prison Libraries Act is an attempt to shift this dynamic,” Cleaver stated. “By making strategic investments in the rehabilitative components of America’s correctional facilities, we can reduce recidivism, strengthen public safety and curtail the growing costs of our correctional system.”

Public libraries in the free world are funded partly by government grants, but mostly through property taxes. Funds for state prison libraries, however, mostly come from corrections department (DOC) budgets, where they’re not the highest priority.

The American Library Association (ALA), which consulted on the legislation, has previously suggested that adequate annual funding for a prison library would be about $13 per capita. So based on some extremely informal calculations, we can say the Act might fund services at 500 facilities—about one-third of the state prisons in the country.

A wide range of library services would be eligible for the new grant funding, including digital literacy training; financial literacy training; job training; “modern” books and equipment; redesigning and decorating so the space is still security-compatible but “more welcoming”; peer-led programming; and hiring library staff. All services would be free, including printing and use of “computers (including laptops) and the internet within the library. “

Nowhere does anyone propose training incarcerated people to work as librarians. 

In June 2025, the ALA published an in-depth report on the myriad benefits of investing in prison libraries. However much the state invests in prison education programs is estimated to save five times that amount in future incarceration costs—the programs reduce recidivism that dramatically.

The report makes repeated references to the importance of access to trained library staff, the inherent difficulty of retaining outside library staff in a correctional environment, and how “investing in prison library programming would reduce the economic impact of recidivism by enabling incarcerated individuals to begin the process of reintegrating into the workforce.”

The ALA also told Filter that it provided input on the Act “in consultation with prison library workers.” But nowhere in the report nor in the Act does anyone propose training incarcerated people to be librarians. 

Not every prison has a general library, but one way or another they probably all have a librarian.

Filter has previously reported on how prison library access changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how, in the absence of library services provided by the state, prisoners have created their own. 

“I get to talk to folks I wouldn’t normally talk to, about something I love. Which is books. I’ve always loved books,” Luther, incarcerated in a private prison in Tennessee, told Filter in 2024.

Luther runs a unsanctioned library out of a broom closet, for which his fellow prisoners pay him $5 a week from a mutual aid fund of their own money. He logs every book that’s checked out or returned, and writes short reviews on index cards to help people decide what to read next.

“[M]any so-called libraries are little more than a few dusty shelves, often not managed by trained library workers,” the ALA report states. “Thus, some prisons have libraries worthy of the name, but many others have only minimal or nonexistent services. This means that many incarcerated people have no real access to a meaningful library and the expertise of librarians.”

The intention here is obviously to say that prisoners deserve more library access than they currently have, but it seems remiss that incarcerated librarians aren’t at the center of the whole discussion. Not every prison has a general library, but one way or another probably every prison has a librarian.

Some are formally assigned to DOC library services, some are de facto librarians like Luther, some are jailhouse lawyers, some are in segregation 23 hours a day and selling poetry to the other book-starved guys on their tier, but in any community of incarcerated people someone will have made it their business to facilitate access to reading material. These would generally be people with an affinity for books; who have institutional knowledge that could help scale up library services at their respective facilities; and who are not subject to the same factors that keep outside librarians from coming in on a regular basis, such as the ability to be anywhere else.

Image via State of New Jersey Department of Corrections

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At the time, Crane couldn’t read the words on his Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) identification card; he didn’t know the shapes of the letters of the alphabet. But he felt that the teacher didn’t believe he really couldn’t read, and wasn’t invested in helping him learn. After a while, he stopped going to class.

I’ve never had any formal training to be a teacher, but I couldn’t say no. I found a copy of a large-print Reader’s Digest, and off we went. We worked together for about an hour a day, four or five days a week. I made flashcards for letters, and then for words. Less than a year later, I saw Crane reading a letter from his daughter by himself, for the first time. It was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever experienced. I’m not sure who cried more, him or me.

Though the commonly cited statistics tend to be from many years ago, it’s estimated that at least 60 percent of adults incarcerated in the United States can’t read at a fourth-grade level. Illiteracy has a profound impact on almost anyone. But in prison it has a direct and immediate impact on family connection. 

Crane asked me for help not just because he wanted to learn to read, but because of the steep consequences of not knowing. Since he was assigned to be in the education classes, not showing up meant he got a disciplinary writeup. In addition to losing the privilege of purchasing clothes and hygiene packages, he also lost visitation privileges and couldn’t see his family for six months.

When you go to prison, handwritten letters become the foundation of a lot of communication with people on the outside. Access to phones is often limited, and the calls are expensive. Shame causes many people to hide the fact that they can’t read from their families, and so they’ll receive letters that they’re not able to read or respond to without help.

“I fear the state will use the fact that educational material is on the tablet, and take away in-person learning.”

Earlier in 2025, everyone in TDOC custody was issued tablets for the first time. They come with a lot of things for prisoners to blow their money on, but they also have lots of free educational materials from GED prep to culinary art classes. Yet there’s no coordination at all between the tablet contents and the education courses taught in prison; students also can’t take their tablets to class, so they can’t even show the teachers what they’re working on and ask questions about it.

“It would be great if I could help a student with difficult math problems he is having trouble getting through on his tablet,” one teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told Filter. They said that it seems like the quality of educational material on the tablets is a lot higher than the curricula they use in class.

A prisoner who works as an aide in the education department echoed the same sentiment.

“I fear the state will use the fact that educational material is on the tablet, and take away in-person learning,” they said. “Some students can work independently and thrive, where others need personal guidance.”

Over the years I’ve helped two other people learn to read, though they both started from a place of already knowing the alphabet. Anecdotally, I’ve seen that these days people under 40 or so who struggle to read have picked up a bit of it through social media, whereas older folks who didn’t use social media before prison get passed by.

The tablets don’t allow us to access the internet, but they come with a learning curve of their own. Though older prisoners may struggle more in class than the younger generation, that doesn’t mean that moving everything onto the tablets would benefit them. What made the difference for Crane was one-on-one tutoring—that, and being able to take bathroom breaks whenever he needed them.

A couple of months ago, a new guy in the prison was talking on the phone, saw me and motioned me to come over. It was Crane. He handed me the phone and I spent the next few minutes talking to his daughter, who thanked me for helping her dad learn to read all those years ago. She said she wasn’t sure they would be as close as they were today if he couldn’t read her letters.

*Name has been changed to protect source

Image (cropped) via New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision

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