It would seem your correspondent Dick Turpin is still stuck in the 1700s with his attitude to the criminal justice system. Perhaps getting hanged made him loose his head as this letter was clearly written by someone with no brain.

I regularly attend prisons for work and they are bleak horrible places where all hope goes to die. The level of self harm and people in mental health crisis in prison is horrific. I know a prisoner whose face was hanging off as the prison stopped sewing it up every time he self harmed. That is the reality of prison.

In Dick Turpin’s day we had squalid conditions and the death penalty. In those days life meant life but that didn’t stop him committing crime so why would it work now. Dick knows it won’t work, we only have to look to America to see that what Dick advocates doesn’t work.

Turning to suspended sentences, does Dick seriously think the mother who miscarried twins, whose partner consumed with grief hung himself, and in distress she set a cushion in her house on fire deserved to go to prison? Well she did and she committed suicide there. A suspended sentence could have spared her life. The reality of prison is 23 hour bang up in horrible conditions.

Dick needs to get out of the 1700s and realise we tried life meaning life, we tried squalid conditions, which we still largely have, and it didn’t stop him or anyone else committing crime.

I challenge Dick to come to court and prison with me and see how bad it really is.

Lefty do gooder lawyer