Not planning to kill someone is no excuse. Your friends stupidity, arrogance and complete disregard for other people led him to kill someone. He should be punished. Yes, the “young kid” who killed four other people should be punished. Sent to jail.

I have exceeded the speed limit in a few instances where I was not concentrating – not enough to cause any more damage than I could have at the speed limit. Some of us do respect the law more than others. I have never caused an accident in 47 years of driving. I have never killed anyone.

It is too late to stop an offender after they have killed someone and runined the lives of their victim's family. Most people show "remorse" because they are sorry for themselves. Criminals are sorry for what the have done only when they are caught and waiting sentencing.

Few people can be rehabilitated, and it is not the job of the law to rehabilitate anyone.

I don’t know of anyone who has been branded a criminal through “bad luck”

Oh I see the “Revenge” word being bandied around. Not a good start.

I would sooner see things like “protect the innocent from the guilty” being stridently advocated than simply seeking to lessen the confinement of the guilty.

Prison is not about revenge, it is about containment and punishment, noting a significant difference between punishment and revenge, example, I punished my daughters when they were naughty, I did not exact “revenge” on them.

I would also note, everyone makes their own choices. No one is forced to undertake criminal acts.

I would further note, to end up in prison these days, you have to have done something pretty bad and actually blown all the non-custodial options of fines, warnings, community based sentences and probation to actually end up in prison.

I generally agree with Leigh on most things but, just this once, I would suggest for drug dealing offenses, the sentences are too long. The sentence for a second drug dealing offense should be a short one, just enough time to wake up the hangman or the injector of lethal fluids.

Those who pursue the practice of dealing drugs and profit by destroying the lives of the gullible deserve no consideration.

Oh, I have never been a prisoner but have worked within the walls of a medium security prison. I have a brother who spent 9 months following a culpable driving offence, mostly in a low security prison farm.

The concensus among those who deal with offenders is it is only the culpable drivers who ever express true remorse, the rest, male or female, are only sorry they got caught.

I had another relative who did a short sentence in a medium security facility for insurance fraud to support a drug habit. One of the best things which happened to him was that stint. Being closely supervised gave him opportunity to be detoxed and refocus his life. He came out a lot better person than when he went in

Easy Times, I share your concerns, particularly the issue of people thinking that they won’t get caught, because the probability of them getting sprung is generally pretty small, or perceived to be very small.

So the length of jail terms is not a deterrent.

What is an effective deterrent then? A good policing regime. And that’s where the whole system falls down.

In some ways the policing regime is pretty good, especially at the big end of the scale. But jees, on the lower half of the spectrum it is just pathetic.

So we have people committing all sorts of relatively minor infringements with virtual impunity, or at least a feeling of impunity.

I don’t know if prison sentences are too long, or whether penalties in general are too high, but I do know one thing; the policing of the majority of the rules of our society is pathetically poor, everyone knows it, and that is the main reason why offences occur.

So why don’t we lower all sentences by say 25% and redirect the tax-payers dollars saved therein into improving the whole law-enforcement regime, and hence the deterrent factor?

A vastly improved law-enforcement regime is of vital importance. But this doesn’t necessarily mean a greater police presence, or a heavier hand from Big Brother.

Ultimately it means making sure as best as we can that the laws that the vast majority of us agree with are enforced at face value or as close to it as can be achieved.

So rather than increasing the police presence, or conspicuousness, I advocate making police much less conspicuous, by way of unmarked cars and plain clothes, so that they meld into the populace…. and so that in the eyes of a potential law-infringer, just about any adult or any car on the road could potentially be a police officer or a police vehicle.

A much-improved response mechanism to public complaints is also needed. We need to better empower the public to do their bit, rather than the current situation of effectively discouraging people from making complaints or reporting incidents that aren’t of an obvious serious nature.

My belief is prison should be a system of pest control for certain crimes where compensation to the victim is impossible such as rape, torture or murder.

Ludwig I see where you are going and that is fine in a major crime sense but I would worry about relying on secret police as a psychological weapon especially as civil rights in Australia is currently in decline. Uniformed presence is probably more effective.

I dont know why speed camera locations are advertised and 'booze buses' not as speed is the major killer on the roads. This is a point to be considered as speeding is conciously breaking the law and probably murders more innocent people than serial killers.

If somebody is caught speeding more than twice in 12 months why are they allowed to keep their licence? Clearly they do not have the aptitude to drive saftely and should lose their licence for life.

West

The presence of uniform police doesn’t work very well because they are so thin on the ground. Even if we doubled the number, they would still constitute a very thin blue line. It is immediately obvious to potential offenders that there are no police around most of the time. So the answer simply must rest partly with the wide-scale implementation of inconspicuous police.

Yes it is a psychological tool, just the same as increasing jail sentences and penalties of all sorts are designed to be a psychological tool.

But of course, increased penalties fail as an increased deterrent for as long as people feel that they stand an overwhelmingly good chance of getting away with their flagrant law-breaking activities, which they do with most relatively minor infringements.

Our civil rights are in decline. But surely strong and even enforcement of the law is not going to hasten this. It would improve civil rights.

Besides, ‘psyching’ the populace into a much better standard of law enforcement can surely only be a positive thing.