Are you just one of Myra's lynch mob?

Myra Hindley will never be free. Michael Howard has told her this officially. It will take a brave home secretary to release this woman and we do not expect such bravery from Michael Howard. Why should this woman be free when the parents of the children she helped murder have had to live with a life sentence of grief? Why doesn't she do the decent thing demanded in countless tabloid editorials and commit suicide?

There is of course more than one way of taking a life and we have taken Hindley's. The average life sentence is 14 years: she has been in prison more than three decades. No one seriously believes that she will be a danger to anyone if released. She is a 54-year-old woman with osteoporosis yet we refuse to see her this way. Instead she is forever a peroxided evil tart who didn't have the grace to go mad as Brady did; a woman who defied the basic instincts of her gender. It's possible according to the certifiable Dr Raj Persuad, a consultant psychiatrist employed by the Daily Mail, that upon release she could even meet another Brady. Once more she could become the accomplice of a man obsessed with Nazism and sadism. Once more she could ...

So Hindley will die in jail and the anguished parents of her victims still raw with pain will declare this "the best day of their lives". The judge at her trial is reported as saying at the time that he didn't believe she was beyond redemption but politicians, not the judiciary, have decided that she is.

Her supporters - including Lord (Loopy himself) Longford - appear to have done her more harm than good by their very unworldliness. How would you feel, the mob screams at this 91-year-old man, if it were your child? How would you feel? Wouldn't you want to kill them? Destroy their life as they have destroyed yours? That's what it is to be human and by implication the likes of Longford are as devoid of human response as Hindley herself.

Yet Longford, sustained by his Catholicism, is one of the few public figures who are not embarrassed to talk about forgiveness or at least its possibility. Forgiveness does not make for sexy headlines. No, all these years later we prefer headlines like "Evil Myra's Lesbian Love Calls Are Axed" or "Brady: Don't set Myra Free" or "Rose West and Myra Hold Hands". We prefer to leave Hindley in jail, locked forever in the terrible events of the mid-Sixties.

She struggles in her letters to explain herself but never shows enough remorse or understanding of what she has done. What would enough be? She is cold, manipulative, detached, analysing herself as if she were only ever an iconic media representation, never a woman of the flesh with blood on her hands. As time goes by she becomes increasingly articulate and we understand her less and less, condemn her more and more. In 1978 it was thought that she should serve a shorter sentence than Brady. In 1990 the Home Secretary decided that she should serve a whole life sentence. Have the sentences been rejigged as her release date draws nearer or have we become less forgiving? How has this woman moved from being possibly redeemable to being utterly beyond redemption in the course of 30 years? If we do not begin to understand this then the lynch mob rules indeed.

During the trial of the boy murderers of James Bulger, young men gathered at the court. Blake Morrison in his book As If describes them thus: "The men ... had come wanting to kill the kids who killed the kid, because there's nothing worse than killing a kid." Morrison's troubled and troubling book attempts to understand what happened at that trial, how children were put on trial as if they were adults by adults who should have but didn't let themselves know better.

By the anniversary of James's death those sad, fat little 10-year-olds had already joined the pantheon of "Britain's most reviled killers". The spectacle was raised that they may be freed in their early twenties and already a campaign has been mounted to keep them in prison forever. Various Bulger relatives had vowed to kill the two upon release, just as the relatives of Hindley's victims promise to murder her.

Surely if we have any faith in rehabilitation which after all is still one of the professed aims of incarceration, then children have more chance of being rehabilitated than adults, yet if we continue to judge these boys as adult murderers then no forgiveness is possible.

It is difficult to talk about forgiveness from a secular viewpoint, we don't have enough markers. We are merely proclaiming our faith in an idea. We sound far too wishy-washy, far too liberal. Yet as Morrison writes, "Only a culture without hope cannot forgive - a culture that doesn't believe in progress or redemption. Have we so little faith in ourselves we can't accept the possibility of maturation, change, cure?"

The answer is that we have little faith indeed. While the language of therapy crops up everywhere - the concepts of repression, denial and projection are commonplace - our belief in actual change is small. Tinkering with ones psyche may be positive but the chance of deep and meaningful change we feel remains remote. So we sit in judgement, closing down on people whose worlds closed down long ago.

I fear it is already too late for Hindley. Her case has already been taken out of the hands of the judiciary and become obscenely tied to political posturing that does nothing constructive for any one, least of all the red-eyed parents of her victims who must relive their trauma time and again for the rest of us. Hindley is right to argue that she has now become a political prisoner. But it is not too late for Bulger's killers, and to bracket them alongside her and Brady is another kind of crime altogether. If our justice system is to be based on the feelings of the bereaved alone then we may as well hang every killer and be done with it.

It is unfashionable in these days of law and order to insist that prison must serve some purpose beyond that of simply punishment, but we must. Is to align oneself with loony peers, judges and other professionals who support Hindley's release mean that one has been duped by a scheming middle-aged woman? Is it too much to ask for a penal system that is no longer fuelled by the lust for revenge alone?

We have a choice as to whether we are ruled by our baser instincts or whether we believe it is possible to rise above them. In our hearts we may never accept that those individuals who have taken the lives of children are ever able to do this. Collectively, however, we must have faith in that possibility, for without it all sentences become death sentences.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or excusing hideous crimes, it means only that we believe in the potential for change, that we choose life over death, that faced with horrific acts and evil monsters, we endeavour in whatever way we can to remain human. If this is asking so much then let each and every one of us stand in the enormous queue of those who are prepared to do to Hindley what she did to others, to join the lynch mob. Then we might know what she knows and we might know what it is like to be no longer human.