The problem doesn't seem to be in the school system. The US education system is #1 in terms of teaching literacy to people of Asian descent and #2 in teaching literacy to people of European descent. There is insufficient data to compare to other groups.
However, you might be right that knowledge of literacy is a problem - crime in the US does tend to be disproportionately committed by groups of people who have low averages on PISA literacy tests.
Not significantly so in comparison to Korea, Finland, Canada, or New Zealand; anyway the more meaningful comparison among countries based on PISA data seems to be the comparison found in the PISA document I linked above. It would be worthwhile also to include more Caribbean countries in the data set.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf (See tables R1 and R3, which give breakdowns of the PISA data you are citing.)
However, you might be right that knowledge of literacy is a problem - crime in the US does tend to be disproportionately committed by groups of people who have low averages on PISA literacy tests.