Madam, - Rick Lines, executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (August 19th), like his colleague Edward Boyne (August 16th), is less than forthright about his organisation's ambitions.
He was more forthcoming in an article in the the Irish Examiner of August 6th. In a nutshell, the IPRT is against mandatory drug testing in prisons; mandatory minimum sentences; electronic tagging; replacing Mountjoy and Cork prisons (which will enable prisoners to have their own single cells and lavatories), because there will, seemingly, be spare capacity.
Mr Lines has as an acccomplice in this liberal blancmange - Mr John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy Prison, who said in the Irish Examiner of August 2nd: "Counteracting criminal culture requires resources and amenities to improve people's prospects and chances to compete. For everything \ invest in prisons it should be compulsory to spend 10 times that amount on preventive stuff."
The cost of retributive justice is €85,000 per prisoner, as Mr Lines correctly points out. It would, however, have been helpful if he informed the public that the cost of his preferred rehabilitative sentencing regimen would be treble or quadruple that figure.
A succession of surveys have found that the majority of the public have long yearned for a mixture of rehabilitative (especially for juvenile offenders), restorative and, finally, retributive justice for hardened recidivist criminals. Hopefully, with Mr McDowell's minimal and democratic proposals, we might achieve something similar. - Yours, etc.,
EOIN McMAHON, Northumberland Road, Dublin 4.