THE INJUSTICE in the Mrs. Christos case was not to
her, but to her family. A correspondent in The Times a few days ago aired the view I have long held, that the two forms of punishment now recognised by the law, fines and imprisonment, are often neither of them appropriate in certain cases. In a laudable desire to make deterrence more • humane, by abolishing old-fashioned humiliating punishments, such as the pillory, the community has in fact made punishment more inappropriate to the crime and more harsh to the victim. Crimes against the community of the kind that Mrs. Christos committed could more fittingly be expiated by reparation—for example, by sentencing offenders to corrective' training of a kind which will mean that a breadwinner or the mother of a family need not be deprived of their liberty or separated from their dependants.
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