reading for pleasure

I have been digging this wonderful book of Neil Gaiman essays to accompany my miles across the country. This quote in particular caught my attention.

"Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons—a huge growth industry in America. 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, fifteen years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure."

via {view from the cheap seats}
image via {indexed}