The car thief

My cousin and her husband live in the suburbs of London. One morning they woke up to find that their car had been stolen from outside their house. They immediately phoned the police to report the theft, before leaving for work by bus.

When they returned home later the same day, they found to their surprise that their car had been brought back and was parked in its usual place outside their house. Under one of the windscreen wipers was a small envelope.

They quickly opened it and found a note apologizing for “borrowing” their car. The man who had written it explained that he didn’t have a car himself and his wife had gone into labour in the middle of the night with their first baby. So he hoped they didn’t mind too much that he had taken their car without their permission in order to run her to the hospital.

By way of compensation, he enclosed two tickets for the West End show on Saturday evening. They were both delighted as they loved music and had been trying for ages to get tickets to this particular musical.

It was a perfect evening. They had front row seats and the show itself was as good as they had expected. They were in such a good mood after it that they decided to go for a meal at their favourite Italian restaurant. When they eventually got home just after midnight, a new shock awaited them. While they were away, their house had been burgled! Everything of value had been stolen. They knew immediately who the thief was because lying on the kitchen table was a note in handwriting they recognized, saying: hope you enjoyed the show!

Task 60. Speak on your idea of how to prevent crime and to deal with criminals.

Task 61. Translate the texts in writing.

1.

Studying Crime

There are a lot of practical difficulties in the study of crime. First, a great many offences are never discovered by or reported to the authorities. They include such offences as exceeding speed limits or illegal parking, but in large cities can include serious crimes such as burglary and robbery. In many instances victims do not want publicity, which is often true in cases of rape, children stealing from parents, and business frauds.

A second difficulty is that the police and public prosecutors prosecute only a percentage of crimes that are reported to them. There may be insufficient evidence, or the authorities may decide not to prosecute certain types of offences and offenders, preferring to deal with them in other ways.

Criminologists (scientists who study crime) include in their research studies the measuring of hidden crimes which may not appear in ordinary police statistics. They may question people about crimes it is known they have committed but for which they have not been prosecuted. They may question people to find out if they have been victims of crimes which they have not reported to the police. This kind of research is a useful way of discovering the amount of criminal behaviour which truly exists in society, the cases of such behaviour, and the reasons for such behaviour not being prosecuted in the courts.

2.

In the United States today there are more than half a million criminals serving time in prison. Most prisoners are male high-school dropouts between the ages of 18 and 29. Even more shocking is the fact that the number and rate of imprisonment has more than doubled over the past twenty years, and the recidivism – that is, the rate for rearrest – is more than 60 percent.

Although the stated goal of most prison systems, on both federal and state levels, is to rehabilitate the inmates and to reintegrate them into society, the systems themselves do not support such a result. Prisons are usually geographically or psychologically isolated and terribly overcrowded. Even in the more enlightened prisons, only one-third of the inmates have vocational training opportunities or work release options.

If prisons are indeed to achieve the goal of rehabilitating offenders, then the prisons themselves will have to change. First, they will have to be smaller, housing no more than five hundred prisoners. Second, they will have to be built in or near population centers with community resources available for gradual reintegration into society. Finally, prison program must be restructured to include work release and vocational and academic training that promises to carry over into the inmate’s life after release.