Can Carr carve out new life for herself?

But now she is out of prison, she is unlikely to be able to live a normal life ever again - Carr has been found a new address and a new identity to protect her from vigilantes.

Chief Officer at West Mercia Probation, David Chantler, sheds some light on what prisoners face after finishing their sentences.

WITH only a handful of exceptions, everyone who serves a prison sentence is released, either at the end of their sentence or part way through it, under some form of licence which involves supervision by the probation service.

Some discharged prisoners will evoke feelings of sympathy among the community, others will provoke angry feelings and the wish that the keys should have been thrown away when they were first imprisoned.

Whatever our response to individual prisoners, the simple fact is that we are all better off for having them supervised on release.

The prisoner is better off because the issues that were around before sentence, and which were a part of their failure to cope as a good citizen, will still be there when they come out.

In fact many of those problems will have got worse simply because of being in prison.

Why is that? Factors associated with keeping out of trouble include:

n Regular employment - but if you had a job before, the chances are that it will no longer be open to you on release.

n A committed relationship - many relationships do survive a prison sentence, but many do not. The families of prisoners are often described as "serving the second sentence" and many do not survive the experience.

n Accommodation - if you are in prison there is a high likelihood that your accommodation will not be available to you on release and, as with employment and relationships, homelessness is highly co-related to renewed offending.

If these problems were not enough on their own, they get really messy when they all reinforce each other.

So, how do you get a job when you've no settled address to give to potential employers? With no job, how do you provide for the family if they have waited for you? And so it goes on.

You now have the extra problem of the stigma of being a prisoner, so things that were hard before become even harder now.

You go for a job interview; how do you explain the gap in your employment record? Tell the truth and risk the job now or cover up and risk being found out later?

So far, I have only touched on what people who had something in the first place lose through imprisonment.

In fact, those who have been to prison are among the least able to deal with day to day problems. Literacy and numeracy skills are often at the level of a seven year-old. Physical health is likely to be poor and the accommodation issue that I referred to earlier can make it difficult to register for health services.

If this was a description of you, would you feel good about yourself? If not, how are you going to go about improving your self image and rising to some of these challenges when the popular stereotypes of former prisoners are so strong?

And yet, consider this.

More than 30 per cent of men in England and Wales have convictions that could have resulted in a prison sentence by the time they were 30, and without wanting to be flippant about it, they are only the ones who got caught.

My point is that we live and work with offenders every day of our lives but only some are marked out as ex-prisoners.

Some people will read this and feel the sympathy I referred to earlier; others will think that they get all that they deserve.

But the simple truth is we know that if we allow reading and writing skills, accommodation, employment, health care and accommodation to go unaddressed we are creating a breeding ground for more offending and more prisoners.

The best way to rid ourselves of the problem of resettling prisoners is to stop them needing to be sentenced in the first place and that can only happen outside of prison, in local communities.