Justice & Law Quote by Jeffrey Archer

A politician doesn’t throw out a number like “Sixty per cent” for texture; he throws it like a brick through a window. Jeffrey Archer’s line is engineered to make “prison” feel less like a sealed moral category and more like the end of a broken supply chain: failure in schools, in welfare systems, in public imagination. “Illiterate” does heavy lifting here. It’s not just about reading; it’s a shorthand for exclusion, for being locked out of work, bureaucracy, and basic civic competence. The subtext is blunt: we’re not merely punishing crime, we’re warehousing the socially abandoned.

The intent is also tactical. By focusing on literacy rather than violence, addiction, or poverty, Archer reframes prison reform as a safer political sell. Voters who might resist empathy for “criminals” can more easily support interventions that sound like common sense: education, training, early prevention. Literacy becomes a proxy that lets compassion sneak past the “tough on crime” reflex.

The context matters because Archer is a politician with a flair for narrative and a history entangled with the criminal justice system himself. That adds a faint double edge: is this a conscience speaking, a reformer’s statistic, or a storyteller selecting the most morally clarifying figure? Either way, the line works because it forces a reckoning with causality. It implies that the state meets many citizens not in the classroom, but at the cell door - and by then, the bill is due, with interest.