Editorial: With light prison terms and a lack of jail cells, who can be surprised that killers in Northern Ireland skip custody

​​Two killers disappeared from custody in Northern Ireland last weekend.

Stephen McParland and Alison McDonagh (nee Martin) went absent without leave from prison on Saturday, the former held in Maghaberry, the latter Hydebank.

McParland once battered a man to death in Belfast, McDonagh fatally knifed a man in Newtownabbey. It is the fourth time she has absconded.

Last year the News Letter reported that a man serving a murder sentence had vanished on home leave. The authorities did little to notify the public then and he remains at large.

In one sense these are breath-taking lapses of security. On the other they are not remotely surprising.

As a society we are getting ever more vigilant and punitive about a range of offences from stalking to hate crime to domestic violence to sex offences. But when it comes to the most serious of all, ending another human being's life, we have been lenient for decades.

It is true that tariffs for murder have crept up in recent years so that the shameful scenario in which people convicted of murder were (not so long ago) sentenced to 'life' but typically served 12 or 13 years has been replaced by a slightly more robust sentencing framework in which they will generally be detained for 20 years or on occasion more.

But much of the detention system has been a shambles for a long time. As a society we seem confused about whether or not we are pro prison or anti it. In some spheres we seem to be very pro, in others not.

If we believe that prison works then NI might need to be bigger prisons, yet few politicians argue for that.

Thus we have a haphazard, at times chaotic, system of generally mild sentences, and temporary release in the latter stages of the term, over which there seems to be only limited control.