Letters to the editor: Prisoners should work and earn their keep

Waikeria Prison. Photo / File

I have just received a communication from Amnesty International asking for help - which I am happy to give.

The organisation discusses the appalling conditions faced by many in the NZ prison system. I agree and have for a long time thought that just locking up miscreants and keeping them in cells for 23 hours a day is a silly waste of resources.

I preferred the American system of making them work.

Since there appears to be a marked reluctance among Kiwis to earn an honest crust - preferring, as they do, to help themselves to others' crusts, and with the amount of work that needs doing - roads, railroad tracks that need widening, crops that need harvesting, why not have the prisoners work and earn their keep?

Much more sensible and it would help train them for release.

Jim Adams
Rotorua

Thank goodness for libraries

I felt as if Rob Rattenbury was telling my story (Opinion, May 17).

I was also an asthmatic child – a little bit older than Rob. In the mid-1940s and through the 1950s, I was also often absent from school because of asthma attacks.

A friend from school would sometimes bring me schoolwork to complete at home. Confined to bed and sometimes hospitalised, books were my salvation. Hospitals back then did not supply much else in the way of a diversion.

At home I shared a bedroom with an older sister who was not a reader. Consequently, in the evenings in front of the open fire I could be found reading.

The time would come when my sister and I would be told to go and get ready for bed. My sister was happy to tuck into bed with lights out which didn't suit me.

Off I would go, get into my pyjamas and then I would sneak back into the lounge and hide behind the big old sofa we had at the time and bury my head in a book.

After some time, I would hear my mother say to my dad – "Has Trish gone to bed yet?" The game was up and I would be sent off to bed with a flea in my ear.

Reading must have served me well in spite of many absences from the classroom as when I started college the aptitude test placed me in the academic class.

I am still an avid reader and cannot go to sleep at night without reading a few chapters of the current library book. My husband is also a reader and consequently our children always had a bedtime story and later we enjoyed reading to our grandchildren.

Thank goodness for libraries.

Trish Simpson
Te Puke

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