Letter: Don't write off community payback

IT IS clear, from his 98 previous convictions, that Lawrence Winters is hardly someone who obeys the law and therefore his failure to abide by the community payback order (CPO) enforcement rules can hardly be a surprise (your report, 8 March).

What is quite clear is that prison has failed him but that certainly does not mean the CPO system has failed and the matter of the appropriateness of the sentence is something for the sheriff to address.

But Lawrence Winters had a choice: to conform to the regulations or go to jail. By his actions, or rather inaction, he chose the latter and for the next three months we, as tax payers, will fork out in excess of 10,000 to keep him in custody.

The comments of other politicians (and, to some extent, your editorial) were predictably negative but then anyone can knock an idea; it takes a bit more effort to offer some constructive proposals.

In an effort to be positive I cite the work currently being undertaken in Liberton Cemetery where, under appropriately trained supervision, those fulfilling their community service sentences have now rebuilt some 60 headstones.

These memorials, having been deemed unsafe, had been laid flat but now, in one section of the graveyard, the dramatic improvement achieved demonstrates the positive benefit to the community that CPOs could make.

With some 9,500 headstones in Edinburgh cemeteries now having been laid over on the grounds of safety there is plenty of work for those sentenced under the CPO and this positive activity would certainly benefit the community and society in general.

Alan McKinney

Beauchamp Road

Edinburgh

Every city and every town has a great many "Lawrence Winters". Just take a look at the daily lists of any court house in Scotland and the same names appear again and again.

If any political party, whether they are north or south of the Border, would actually acknowledge that there is an ever-increasing under-class and whole families who haven't even tried to find work for generations, they would get my vote and I should imagine those of thousands of others.

Fines are laughable as they are paid through the benefit system, if at all, and schemes such as the new community payback order are equally doomed to failure.

In these harsh economic times some hard decisions are going to have to be made and the politician who actually puts his head above the parapet and proposes drastic measures to save the tax payer a fortune and get some kind of return from these people will be very popular indeed.

Andrew McKenzie

Newburgh

Fife