An urgent need to overhaul our criminal justice system!

I usually avoid reading the monthly crime-watch correspondence as it makes for worrying reading at the best of times as the number and frequency of crime locally continue to rise. But this week I had a flick-through and the rate of reoffending was shocking. A murder was committed in the neighbourhood next to mine and the offender had 41 previous court appearances and had committed 117 crimes. Each time he came out of prison his next crime was worse than the previous.

Society could shrug and say: lock them up and let them rot in prison BUT who faces the brunt of it each time they are released back into society?

By now there should be clear and consistent guidelines for sentencing criminals and all non-violent offenders should be sent to separate prisons and in each prison, prisoners should be separated into groups based on years left to serve, so that those near to release are together and reform together, to give them half of chance. Mixing violent criminals with non-violent criminals and overcrowded prisons is likely leading to the current situation of high reoffending and the steady increase in the degree of crimes committed by reoffenders.

Apart from the obvious waste of public funds, it is really difficult to imagine the grief of the families of victims murdered by a reoffender who started out as a petty thief, went to jail, came out and became a violent robber, went to prison, came out and became a murderer. Society is losing out.

America has imprisoned hundreds of thousands of its citizens on drugs related offences. They are locked into a system they will never get out of. Locked up in prisons with all sorts of criminals and dismissed by society and abandoned by their government to continue in the vicious cycle of coming out of prisons, shunned by society, reoffend, back to prison and on it goes. For the sake of their victims (if nothing else) this system needs an urgent overhaul! If offenders are separated out into prisons with those who have committed non-violent offences in separate prisons, the rate of reoffending will reduce

We cannot continue with the present day arrangements with criminals going in and out of prisons, becoming hardened and destined to commit graver and graver offences. The entire system needs an urgent rethink