Lawbreakers should no longer be branded offenders because the term is “insulting”, a leading criminal justice campaigner said today.
Frances Crook, head of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the phrase demeaned criminals and hindered their rehabilitation.
She said it was “easy” for politicians to treat some sections of society as “other” and less than human.
“Someone who commits an offence is not an offender, they are someone who has done something. The action does not define the whole person,” she wrote in the journal Criminal Justice Matters.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...-campaigner.do
I prefer simply to refer to them as SCUM
