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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 10. 24 May 1972

Abolish Prisons..

Abolish Prisons...

Playfair sees the only solution to this problem in a system of indeterminate sentences, which would give the prisons the chance to exercise whatever rehabilitative effect they have for just the right time to give the maximum benefit to the prisoner. Yet, as he only too willing to point out this system would have a devastating effect on civil liberties, and in the cases where it has been tentatively attempted — for example in preventive detention, it has shown no great signs of success. It depends on a complete change in the prison system, which at one moment Playfair says is probably impossible, and at the next he postulates. We are returned to the abolition of the prison system as the only effective measure of penal reform.