To:[email protected]
From:[email protected]

Dear Principal,

I am writing to express my opinion on whether detention is a suitable form of punishment. After a person commits crime, suitable punishment will be given to one. Not only as a payback to the criminal, punishment can allow one to understand the severity of one’s fault. It is somehow a way for criminal to have a thorough evaluation. In my opinion, detention can neither act as a payback to the student nor an opportunity of evaluation.

Detention is a traditional punishment introduced in schools. Students are forced to stay after school if they behave badly. Seemingly, detention can provide a time period for the student to evaluate what one had done before. Nevertheless, students seldom make use of that time period to have an entire introspection. Instead, students choose to sleep ,chat with the classmates and even daydream during detention period. Obviously, detention turns out to be a paper tiger without teeth. Never can detention be an effective way to punish the students. The students staying in the detention class are punished on the surface. Those students may not understand their faults. This is totally distorting the root purpose of punishment.

Worse still, a wrong signal will be sent to the other students such that they suppose they can keep on behaving badly if only they present in the detention class. In spite of the effort on educating the significance of morality, the inappropriate punishment method still cannot alter the misconception of students. Theoretically, this will foster the unhealthy trend of behaving badly in the school and eventually lead to a vicious circle.Due to the negative implication of detention, it should not be adopted as a suitable form of punishment.

Apart from detention, suitable form of punishment refers to the punishment depending on what the type of misbehaviour is as well as what the student’s personality is. It is high time the school replaced detention with the alternative forms of punishment. I sincerely hope that the school can understand the drawbacks of detention and take action immediately in order to prevent the student from being astray.

Yours faithfully,
Chris Wong