The consequence is hundreds of children behind bars who emerge more angry and dislocated from family or support, and nearly 90 per cent go on to create more mayhem and commit more crime.The Home Office has just published a crime-reduction practice report recommending a move away from primarily punitive to restorative approaches. I had expected a better level of awareness by The Independent.The good news (if you are interested) is that, despite the hurricane’s eye (with its 140 mph winds) passing within 35 miles of TCI and winds there reaching 90 mph, there are no reports of serious injuries. I do hope that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds will allow for the aerodynamic efficiency of modern cars when they come to assess the results.Today’s cars part the air much more effectively than those of even 10 or 20 years ago. This has been very successfully pioneered in Thames Valley with both children and adults. We suggest the Government heeds its own research and develops work with children that helps them change their lives and really does something to create a safer society.FRANCES CROOK Director The Howard League for Penal Reform London N1 Aerodynamic splat Sir: I was interested to read your article (2 September) on the “splatometer” tests to assess the number of flying insects.

Asbos bring restriction, not structure, to children’s lives, and the restrictions are often so lengthy and wide-ranging that they are impossible to adhere to. The world has stood by while hundreds of Israelis were killed by terror attacks, always finding excuses to legitimise and “understand” the use of terror, and, unfortunately and irresponsibly, responding in such a way as to reward terror.Now Russian kids have paid the price for the world’s acceptance of terror. It is no wonder that many today regard the term liberal as an insult, suggesting someone willing to condone anything if it comes with the correct slogans and the requisite anti-Americanism.Dr M SCHACHTER London NW6Sir: The entire world should take responsibility for the terror attacks in Russia Terrorism has become an acceptable tool of protest. In all likelihood these people will return home with no obvious rupturing of their sense of humanity; and yet the failure of imagination or empathy here is perhaps all the greater, all the more insidious, for not having been acknowledged.JEREMY CRANSWICK London SE21Sir: As usual, the “liberal” response to the bestial murderers in Beslan is to seek to excuse them.

The troubling thing is just how casually our empathy, our capacity for envisaging human consequences, can be suspended. The very nature of modern warfare seems to facilitate this.In the case of the suicide bomber, eyeball to eyeball with the innocent people he/she is about to blow up, it is difficult to believe a real rupturing of our common sense of humanity has not occurred. But what of the submarine commander who launches a cruise missile at a target of which he knows or cares little, or the bomber pilot who scatters anti-personnel mines over the mountains, fields and villages of a foreign land?Such acts for them are not defining moments of their existence as equivalent acts would be for the terrorist; they are impersonal and routine. Yet both the rise and fall of Putin’s career have been determined by the demolition of occupied buildings.On 9 September 1999, one month to the day after Putin was chosen as acting prime minister, Russia suffered the first of a series of apartment blasts. The government blamed the Chechens, who denied involvement, but it seemed more likely the blasts were the work of the Russian security forces, seeking a pretext to invade Chechnya. The war was initially popular and Putin won the subsequent election with a landslideNow the Chechens are back and really are blowing up buildings and the ramshackle Russian security forces cannot stop them.RUPERT BOOTH Leamington Spa, WarwickshireSir: Howard Jacobson’s failure of imagination in getting inside the mind of a terrorist (Opinion, 4 September) is hardly surprising, for it is precisely the failure of the terrorist to contemplate the human consequences of his/her act that makes it thinkable in the first place. We should not need terrorism to remind us of this.SHAMIL HAROON BirminghamSir: Mary Dejevsky reports Putin’s standing will fall following the Beslan atrocity (4 September).