[Margaret Pilkington]

The reasons that prisons don't work is because the crims can't wait to get back inside to their cushy lifestyle....with full leisure facilities, TV, and as Willow observed further education opportunities that folk on the outside(decent, law abiding folk, I might add) have to pay for. I don't know what prisons are like over in the USA......but here the criminals have better health care, better nutrition, better leisure faclilties than many of our pensioners. Murderers are accommodated in open prisons...they can walk out and be on the loose for 2 months before we get to hear about it.
We have a Director of Prisons who freely admits that he hasn't a clue how many dangerous criminals are on the loose. Sentences are soft and are almost NEVER served in full....LIFE should mean life......18 months should be 18 months...not the six months that is currently the norm.Prison SHOULD be about deprivation of liberty and social contact......it should be about reparation.....it should be strict enough to deter the wrong doer from offending ever again.