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There are times when, although I’m a Christian, I find some aspects of Christianity hard to take. This week is one of them – when, like so many people in this country, I’ve been outraged by the crimes of Lucy Letby, and think of the young lives she snuffed out and the parents who have to endure a lifetime of extraordinary grief. Yet Christianity requires that we don’t just pray for those families but we also consider that Letby, as much as anyone else, is loved by God and can seek his forgiveness. It's not for me or for anyone else apart from the Almighty and the parents to forgive Letby. And frankly, for them to forgive her would probably require them to be superhuman. But when it comes to people imprisoned for life for their crimes, society needs to ask itself what sort of life they should have in jail. A knee-jerk response is that if someone is guilty of terrible crimes, the authorities should throw away the key. Others have said that they hope Letby lives a very long life, to make her endure the worst possible punishment. And one criminal barrister commented this week that with the worst crimes for which people receive what’s called a whole-life sentence, with no chance of parole, rehabilitation is not possible and that prison is purely punitive. But I’m not so sure. Ideas about punishment in this country have developed from Judaeo-Christian thought. According to the 1952 Prison Act, every prison requires a governor, a medical officer and a chaplain – in other words the prison has responsibilities for the well-being of the mind, body and spirit of every prisoner, including those with whole life sentences. And rather than be purely punitive, work is done with prisoners by psychiatrists and others to try and get the person to face their culpability and find meaning in their existence. Chaplains too can do this, to help a prisoner find their way through the tangle – even the most grotesque tangle – of their lives. In other words, it means attempting to get prisoners to face up to the crucial why – why did you do such things? Beyond the prison walls, many of us cope with terrible crimes by labelling the perpetrator – terrorist, rapist, killer – and in that way, dehumanising them and separating them as much as possible from the rest of us. But inside the prison, there are people willing to encounter the prisoner as a person, despite their terrible deeds. And that is as it should be. After all, even in the days of capital punishment, the judge would recognise the person not just the crime, when they would say after passing sentence: “May God have mercy on your soul”.