Age of innocence?
From Mrs Sam Jettubreck
Sir: Having lived in the same street for many years and seen the area gradually taken over by feral youths, I wonder what Peter J.M. Wayne might suggest I do to stem the rising tide of crime in my street? ‘These are children …for goodness sake,’ wrote Wayne in his review of David Fraser’s A Land Fit for Criminals (Books, 17 June). So that makes their vile insults, burglary and aggression to the community acceptable? When a 14-year-old boy next throws a brick at my windows, and smashes glass in the nearby park so that my grandchildren cut their feet, or when next I am confronted, taunted, spat at or abused, I’ll just remember their age, shall I? Is that supposed to console me?
Mrs Sam Jettubreck
London W6
From Jim Trimmer
Sir: Everybody but Peter J.M. Wayne seems to be agreed that we need more prison places to keep people who would otherwise do us harm out of circulation for longer. However, it is a massively expensive business. So why not do as the NHS does and outsource? There must be plenty of developing countries whose costs are a fraction of our own that would welcome the opportunity to earn some hard currency. This is not deportation but sub-contracting, and, unlike the Americans’ secret gulag, these establishments would be subject to agreed minimum standards and open to periodic inspection.
Foreign nationals and others without established family connections here could easily serve their sentences overseas. A Jamaican drug-dealer would surely think twice before risking another five years’ chokey in, say, Uzbekistan.
Jim Trimmer
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey
Do mention the war
From Oliver Berlau
Sir: Dan Hannan is, of course, right in saying that the subject of the Civil War was close to a taboo in the first decades after the transition (‘Ghosts of the Spanish Civil War’, 17 June).
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