IT seems that Cllr Jim Lord (Aug 21) merely echoes, and amplifies, the bigotries of his more Neanderthal constituents. If so, he does them, and us, little service.

"Bang them up and throw away the key" sounds both simple, and attractive. Deceptively so, in many ways. But it is not without its problems. To begin with, prison capacity. Cllr Lord and his jail-happy colleagues on the magistrates' benches have, between them, upped the prison population by 50 per cent over the last 10 years, and the prisons are full to bursting. Not only is building extra capacity expensive, but finding suitable and acceptable sites is far from easy. Despite his enthusiasm, I do not somehow hear Cllr Lord volunteering a site for a new prison anywhere in his Farnworth ward. Do I? (Didn't think so.)

Keeping people in secure custody is also manpower-intensive, and therefore costly. On the latest information, it costs upwards of £30,000 per year to keep each prisoner in custody. The UK is currently incarcerating around 70,000 people at any given time, and the annual cost of this exercise is a staggering £41 billion! And it isn't very effective -- reoffending rates for ex-prisoners are far higher than for those subjected to other forms of punishment. Admitted, it prevents miscreants from committing further crime for the duration of their stay in prison, but it doesn't achieve much else.

And in any case, much of the most irritating habits of teenage troublemakers are either too trivial to punish by imprisonment or inherently difficult to prove. And even teenagers, however difficult, are entitled to expect that they are proved guilty before they are punished. Councillor Lord and his magistrate colleagues will have to think of something cheaper and more effective than large-scale imprisonment.

Peter Johnston

Kendal Road

Bolton