Madam, - Mr Justice Paul Carney's remarks in your edition of December 21st were touted with a front-page banner promising a defence of the idea that imprisonment is a deterrent to crime. Yet, his half-page article is nothing of the kind. Indeed, it is nothing like an argument at all.
The piece begins as a rambling memoir of 40 years on the job, then meanders into a bizarre three-paragraph anecdote about privileged young people getting bolloxed on port, before wandering off into a complete non-sequitur about stabbings in Limerick. I challenge anyone familiar with the English language to explain what the devil he is talking about for the first two-thirds of the essay.
When the piece finally finds its point, the argument seems to be that "villains" (as he refers to them) today just ain't what they used to be. Today's young offenders are apparently a completely alien, vicious, irredeemable lot, nothing like the decent gents who used to commit crime in the good old days. This argument has a ring of familiarity to it, partially because the same thing could probably be heard from the more senior citizens of every society at every point in history (even in Victorian times, I am sure).
Yet, finally, it seems that the real villains are not so much this new breed of offenders so much as a group of even more sinister characters who "call themselves criminologists". Now, Justice Carney never mentions any of these cads by name, nor does he quote any directly or refer to any particular work. Yet, he has heard some disturbing "sound-bites" from these criminologists - or he thinks he has (later, he admits that he may "have misinterpreted or misrepresented the sound-bites" he thinks he heard) - and these are along the lines familiar to straw men of all sorts (eg, dangerous people should be let free from prison).
Yet, criminologists do not produce "sound-bites." We deal in data, research and analysis. The case against the deterrent value of imprisonment, for instance, is based on a mountain of often highly sophisticated, carefully controlled research - none of which is addressed or examined in this piece in the slightest. - Yours, etc,
SHADD MARUNA, Reader in Criminology, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast.