Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
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Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#2Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#3This could be a bit discriminatory, Brazil has a high analphabetism rate, it will be worst in prison, I suppose.
The ones who can't read should be offered courses and maybe start with easy comics.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#4This is such a condescending understanding of why most crime happens. Especially in a country with as much wealth disparity as Brazil.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#5At school we had a teacher who tried to make us read 10 books a year.
You could choose whatever book you wanted, and you had to write a small summary.
So every one headed to the school library and looked for the smallest books available.
The most popular book that every one read was called something like: "Collection of letters from from my Grandfather" and had around 50 to 70 pages and was very boring.
Many also cheated by watching movie adaptations of books.
Edit: This was back in the time when you could not go online and find dozens of book summaries within minutes.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#6Maybe it was deliberate word play, but 'their' here refers to the prisoners, not the books, in case anyone else misinterpreted this headline to imply they were actually editing the books.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#7This is such a condescending understanding of why most crime happens. Especially in a country with as much wealth disparity as Brazil.
It’s not even attempting to describe why crimes happen. It’s just offering people an incentive to read because literacy is strongly correlated with job prospects. I can’t see a downside to this pilot program. I hope they expand it to include technical/practical training.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#8Short tangencial bit of history:
A Brazilian called Paulo Freire came up with a method which consists of coming up with a short list of words related to the pupils' day-to-day. These words have to cover all the phonemes in Portuguese and the pupils would discuss them.
He managed to teach adults to read very quickly. But, as talking about your reality was integral to the method, he got into trouble with the then military regime.
They threw him into a military jail.
One fine day an officer asked for his help because many of the recruits couldn't read.
But that was precisely why he had been thrown into jail!
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#9This is such a condescending understanding of why most crime happens. Especially in a country with as much wealth disparity as Brazil.
It’s not even attempting to describe why crimes happen. It’s just offering people an incentive to read because literacy is strongly correlated with job prospects. I can’t see a downside to this pilot program. I hope they expand it to include technical/practical training.
The program is called "Redemption through Reading” and the officials statements are in similar vain. The implications are pretty clear.
It's only made worse by how only select people can participate. That is on top of Brazil's history of using literacy tests for racial discriminatation. As well as their current, ineffective mass-incarceration policy (now 3rd largest in the world), which as in the US hits indigenous and black south americans harder. I don't expect they'll have a rich corpus of indigenous literature either.
This is why I am very critical, despite reading a book generally hurting nobody. If they truly wanted to keep people out of prison they should end their mass incarceration and improve inequality, not allow select people (who will be almost definitely be disproportionately white) to get out easier.
But then again the head of state is an outspoken fan of the military dictatorship so that does not seem likely.
Re: Brazil prisoners reading books to shorten their sentences (2020)
#10At school we had a teacher who tried to make us read 10 books a year. You could choose whatever book you wanted, and you had to write a small summary. So every one headed to the school library and looked for the smallest books available. The most popular book that every one read was called something like: "Collection of letters from from my Grandfather" and had around 50 to 70 pages and was very boring. Many also che…
> Many also cheated by watching movie adaptations of books.
This sounds risky as movie adaptations sometimes wildly differ from the original material.