Kenneth Clarke, the new Justice Secretary, is keen to bring down the prison population. There are good arguments to do so. I was reminded of the whole punitive versus rehabilitative question by a recent email concerning my friend Russell L Ford.
Russell has been in prison in Alabama for 23 years. I have been in touch with him for a decade through a scheme called “First Century Christian Ministries” which links Catholics with Catholic prisoners through pen-friendship. You are not allowed to ask your pen-friend what he/she is locked up for, but Russell volunteered to me that he is supposed to have ‘hurt someone very badly’. The question is: did he actually do it?
