The fact that violent prisoners have a statutory right to remission of as much as a quarter of their time has come as a surprise to many people who are already angry at what are widely seen as lenient sentences being handed out by judges for drug crimes, rapes, serious assaults and manslaughter.

Swimming coach paedophile Derry O'Rourke, for example, had four years cut off his 12-year sentence - a 25% reduction in time served in prison for "good behaviour", even though he refused counselling for his sexual predilection.

Michael O'Neill, one of the killers of detective garda Jerry McCabe, will be freed this June because he is entitled to three years' remission on the 11-year sentence he got for gunning down the detective while he was on bank security duty in 1996.

Tomorrow, double killer Derek Wade will be sentenced for the murder of 23-year-old Chinese student Zhi Song, only son, "only descendent" of Jidong Song and his wife Chun Xiang Zhang, whose desperate cries filled the Central Criminal Court last week when the court was told her son's murderer had killed before. For taking the life of William Cahill in June 1997, Wade entered a guilty plea for manslaughter in 1999 and got a five-year sentence, only to knife Zhi Song to death in 2005.

Not surprisingly, Enda Kenny has entered the sentencing debate, with a Fine Gael pledge to ensure, if he gets into government, that violent criminals will receive early release only if they actively earn "time off for good behaviour", instead of getting it almost by default.

He deserves support in this because there is a genuine concern that our justice system needs to be rebalanced to reflect the damage done to the victim. As a policy, however, it would be preferable if it were introduced as part of a comprehensive overhaul of remedial services in our prisons, from drug treatment to job-skills training to counselling for sexual crimes.