Instead of giving up on prisoners, they should be empowered to learn so that can be better equipped in society.

This was the message of Ann Dunstan as she gave the keynote address at the weekly Hamilton Lions luncheon yesterday. "Some people just want to lock them up and throw away the key, but that isn't the answer," said the president of The Reading Clinic. Mrs. Dunstan said testing conducted on 159 local inmates in 1998 concluded that one third of them were considered high-risk for suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

While she cited that looking at the literacy level in the third grade of school indicates the future prison population, she said The Reading Clinic recognised the need for a social skills and anger management programme in Bermuda's prisons. "Most men had such low self-esteem, they were not ready to learn. They had failed for so long," Mrs. Dunstan said.

While participating in the programme, she said, it was identified how prisoners' social behaviour could be affected by learning disabilities. "When a person is dyslexic, they have trouble sequencing letters. It could also cause them to relate events in a difference sequence than they actually happened, then they are branded liars. In school, if a teacher doesn't realise the problem exists, the branding begins there," she said.

Mrs. Dunstan also pointed out that people who possess spatial problems can be unfairly described as aggressive.

"So far we've had 50 inmates go through the programme," she said. "In the first class we had 11 teenage boys and it was said at least ten of them would re-offend. So far, six of them have not returned to jail."

In addition to running the programme at the prisons, which is set to see more inmates graduate on Saturday, The Reading Clinic is currently teaching 15 inmates how to read. Mrs. Dunstan recalled the excitement she witnessed when an inmate in his forties achieved reading two-syllable words for the first time. "He was trying to read `birthday'," she said. "He was so excited that he was able to read that word. He had been in and out of jail since he was 14, but he said now he was learning to read he was never coming back."

Mrs. Dunstan emphasised the importance of prisoners improving their literacy skills. "You can't function in the world if you can't read words like cat and hat. Some prisoners have signed confessions without knowing what they are reading.

"Some are too embarrassed to say that they cannot read."