There are ways to deal with overcrowding in our beleaguered prison system. One way, as you report on 10 June, is to give accurate figures so that the public see the extent of the problem. Another is not to hide behind a new official word “crowding” but to call it what it is: “overcrowding” and acknowledge all it means in terms of poor conditions, restricted regimes and not enough purposeful activity or staff time to go round. But the best way to solve overcrowding is to use imprisonment as a last resort in our justice system, curb sentence inflation and ensure that effective community sanctions and public health measures are available to the courts.
Juliet Lyon
Director, Prison Reform Trust
• I fear for the safety of rambling Iain Sinclair. In his account of his exploration of Hackney (The Ginger Line, 13 June) he writes: “Walkers navigate by sound.” I see him, eyes tight shut, jaywalking across Kingsland Road – identified as a “gurgle of peristaltic juices recovering from a monster kebab” – and stumbling across the Overground, which he has located by a “14-hour sigh of mounting, but never-quite-satisfied sexual bliss”. If he mumbled that to the paramedics picking him off the pavement he might find himself sectioned under the Mental Health Act or, at the very least, held in a secure cell in Pseuds Corner.
Gavin Weightman
London
• Trying to get busy A&E staff to treat patients with acute mental illness properly (Report, 12 June) is like asking motor mechanics to tune pianos in their garages.
Dr Richard Turner
Harrogate
• Is hubris a threat to our national bird (Letters, 15 June)? Today a robin tried twice to come in through the cat flap while our cat sat quietly and watched.
James Salmon and Mary Kenfield
London
• “More than one in 20 infant school classes are above the ceiling” (Report, 12 June). It’ll all end in tiers, mark my word.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
