I read Prince Charles's comments which were made on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4.

I really appreciated it because these are the types of statements that our monarchs should give – calling for freedom of thought and religion.

In a time where Islam is being attacked, when so much misinformation and misconception about Islam is being spread, Prince Charles referenced the Holy Prophet (peace be on him) when he said that “when the Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, he did so because he, too, was seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship”.

I appreciated him saying that, especially because recent reports suggests that attacks are increasing on many minority faiths, including Ahmadis. (I myself am an Ahmadi Muslim.)

Communities are all too often facing state-backed persecution and it is vital that all must be done to alleviate such hardships.

Musharaf Ahmed

London SW15

Our prison system should be one of our biggest concerns in 2017

One of the most foolish political slogans of modern times was Michael Howard's: Prison Works. Unless and until Parliament has the guts to undertake a comprehensive reform of the penal system, in the face of atavistic popular sentiment which favours revenge and punishment, the British prison system will remain far too large, expensive and ineffectual, and degrading in much of its day to day practice.

Of course deterrence and punishment have a role in the administration of justice; but except for an irreducible minimum of incorrigible and dangerous criminals, the main objectives of a civilised penal policy ought to be the reduction of crime and the protection of the public while locking up as few offenders as possible. That can be done in many cases by more imaginative and cheaper solutions than incarceration. We particularly need to steer young offenders away from the prison system, not least because many of them will otherwise become the recidivists and hardened criminals of the future.

Although Spain is only just behind us, Britain is otherwise alarmingly way out in front of the rest of Europe in prison numbers per head of population. Other countries have equally difficult social problems but have found better ways of reducing criminality. Quite apart from the social costs of imprisonment, the financial burden of an ever growing prison population is an absurd waste of taxpayers' money. Just as poor provision for care in the community leaves many elderly people languishing in much more expensive hospital care, the failure to spend money up front on the imaginative treatment of young offenders, lands society with lifetime costs running into millions for maintaining many criminals in prison on and off for much of their lives.

Behind the criminal statistics there are many factors like deprivation, poor education, drugs and mental health issues whose solutions lie elsewhere; but in terms of tackling criminality, we show a typically British lack of interest in how we might learn from other countries' more progressive and enlightened systems. There are plenty of examples in Europe and elsewhere of small well-resourced units, training and educating young offenders for a better life, which show an 80 per cent success rate in avoidance of re-offending; and that, dear taxpayer, would save us millions in the longer term compared with putting them into the criminal factories that large adult prisons often prove to be.

Gavin Turner

Gunton, Norfolk

There are more pressing issues than Farage

Several of your readers have talked of the need for the media to deprive Farage, Trump, and so on of the oxygen of publicity but far more serious in 2016 was the rise to dangerous levels of another gas: nitrous oxide.

John Ashe

Honiton

There’s a reason we prefer our all-inclusive breaks

Felicity Hannah, in “The feel good guide to frugality”, suggests that we should consider a home-swap holiday in lieu of our usual all-inclusive break in Spain.

Presumably she takes her domestic staff on holiday with her to take care of all the housework, meal-planning, shopping and cooking that will still be necessary while she has some free time in which to relax and enjoy herself.

Looking after the family in someone else's house, where everything is unfamiliar, would surely be harder work and less of a holiday than staying at home.

Elizabeth Wilkins