Parents, how powerful is reading? This shocking fact will amaze you. When the prison industry wants to plan how many cells they’ll need 15 years from today, they use a simple algorithm based on what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds can’t read. That’s the power of literacy!

Here’s how renowned author Neil Gaiman explains it:

“Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in the US. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict the answers very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.”

You can find a more complete transcript of Neil Gaiman’s lecture for the Reading Agency here.