Prison policy

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 14

Prison policy

Sir, — R. J. Burns displays exactly the ill-informed and illogical reasoning that Mark Nixon's Movement for Alternatives to Prisons was established to counter. The rate that people are being released from prison is about the same as the rate they are being put in, so how is the community protected when those coming out are more criminally inclined than those going in? Mr Burns quotes contemporary paranoic feeling that “crime and violence are running .at record levels." (a questionable assertion), but follows that with the bizarre miscalculation that the Government should inflict more violence and suffering on offenders. Then Mr Burns raises the question "what about the victim?” I am sure a sentence based on the principle of restitution would be much more use to a victim than one based on punishment, the latter doing nothing to help the victim, the former designed with the victim in mind. — Yours, etc., GRAHAM PARTON. February 17, 1983.