Letter: Prison policy

Your article (15 March) makes very worrying reading when we see that in Scotland we are sending more and more females to our prison system, which is overcrowded and ineffective as far as any rehabilitation programmes are concerned.

We simply cannot continue to build more and more prisons at a cost of 40,000 per prisoner per year, and unless considerably more funding is made available for alternatives to prison the current SNP proposals to phase out short prison sentences will fail.

Dennis Grattan

Mugiemoss Road

Bucksburn, Aberdeen