Re: Populist Thuggery, March
My thanks to our Editor’s endeavour to help us become rational before large sums of money are spent on building more prisons to cope with longer sentences. History should have taught us that this will not make us any safer, and offers less hope of rehabilitating the offender. With the exception of the Paul Bernado and Clifford Olsen personality types, correctional centres generally serve as schools to improve the quality of criminal behaviour. Is that what we want? An arborist once told me that when a branch is cut from the tree, many people buy products to apply to the cut: it is of no benefit to the tree but it makes us feel good. That is what usually happens when most people feel that sentencing by itself is the answer.
