Hobbled from the start

HOW CAN your reporter have been so misleading about Oriwa Kemp (‘‘Abuser’s baby seized by state’’, 9 February)? The fact is she was not ‘‘released on parole ... just five months after being jailed’’. A few simple enquiries would have established she was a first offender released on parole after serving the greater part of her 40-month sentence of imprisonment having completed crucial sensitive counselling and earning a favourable prison report but being ineligible, on account of her youth, for prison-based criminogenic intervention available for older inmates to reduce the horrific social deficit under which she laboured arising from her lengthy immersion in a totally dysfunctional family environment over which she had little or no effective control. It is notable her sentence expired on November 21, 2010, and she has not reoffended in any way in the 42 months following her release – likely attributable to the painstaking efforts made on her and the community’s behalf in the necessarily limited parole period initially available on carefully crafted conditions and, thereafter, under general welfare oversight.

The Parole Board, Corrections staff, and Child, Youth and Family services have self-evidently gone about the exercise of their weighty responsibilities at different times in a transparently commendable way. Ms Kemp’s apparently continuing social deficit should not be wrongly confused with criminality and your reporter should take the trouble to recognise the difference as well as the extent to which Ms Kemp should properly be perceived as herself a victim of an imperfect social environment for which we must all accept some degree of responsibility.