Justice & Law Quote by Wally Amos

It lands like a blunt statistic, but the real force is moral triangulation: crime isn’t framed as a personal failing so much as a literacy failure with social consequences. Coming from Wally Amos - a businessman who turned a homespun product into a mass-market brand - the line carries a particular kind of American authority: the entrepreneur as folk sage, translating structural critique into kitchen-table common sense.

The intent is partly pragmatic persuasion. Amos isn’t trying to litigate criminology; he’s trying to make literacy feel urgent to people who might otherwise treat it as a nice-to-have. By tethering reading and writing to crime, he turns education into public safety, and public safety into a shared responsibility. It’s an argument designed to move donors, policymakers, and parents: fund schools, support tutoring, take adult education seriously.

The subtext is also a warning about how society decides who gets to be “legible.” Illiteracy doesn’t just limit job options; it blocks access to paperwork, contracts, courtroom language, even the ability to narrate your own story in systems that demand forms and signatures. In that light, “resort to crime” reads less like a moral choice and more like a narrowing corridor.

Context matters: late-20th-century debates about “law and order” often treated punishment as the only lever. Amos’s framing nudges the conversation upstream, toward prevention and opportunity, without sounding like an academic. It’s a businessman’s way of saying: if you want fewer broken windows, start with broken schools.