Greg Foxsmith

• THANK you for printing Greg Foxsmith’s piece, (Convict the guilty, not evict the innocent, July 6). Reading it made me feel sorry he is no longer a councillor.

I add one point as someone who was a police station and magistrates’ court duty solicitor in the last century. That is that, while there may be families in which everyone, or at least every male over the age of 16, is a criminal, they are rare and I never came across one.

Usually a family has just one adolescent boy or young man who is a persistent offender or, as people in criminal justice say, or said, a scrote. It is hard to see what scrotes’ parents could do to change their behaviour, especially if the only resident parent is the mother.

It seems advocates of “convict and evict” imagine that scrotes will behave themselves if their parents and siblings risk eviction if they do not. This is not the case; scrotes do not consider others, even if they are close family members.

I learned this in 1979. I had a client charged with Taking and Driving Away. He had many previous convictions for this offence and was only given bail because his parents stood surety for him in a sum they could only have raised by selling their house.

Within days the scrote was again nicked bang to rights in a car he had hot-wired. I changed jobs shortly afterwards so I never discovered the end of the story.

STEPHEN HORNE
Romilly Road, N4