[To the Editor of THE P.ECTATOR.] • haVe been reading
with interest the articles and letters in your columns- about prison treatment, and I listened in the other evening to a wireless discussion more or less on the same subject.
One thing that strikes me is that the former prisoners evidently have a lively sense of what is due to them. I have not noticed that they have. an equally lively sense of what is due to others. They may have, but they have not said so.
I should therefore like, with your permission, to invite one of them to state in your columns whether or not he agrees that society was entitled to come down on him for his breach of the laws which make organised society possible. If he thinks that society was not entitled to come down on him, does he agree that anyone is free to rob him or to half-kill him ?
If, on the other hand, he agrees that society was entitled to come down on him, in what way does he think that Society should have done so ? If he had been sentencing himself, whit sentence would he have imposed on himself ? What sentence would he as Judge have imposed on someone else who had done what he did himself ?—Yours faithfully, JOHN DAVID.
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