Your article "Convict applauded at graduation event" on September 20 refers. It is pleasing to see offenders taking their education seriously. It is also a challenge to our youth who are dicing with their future by ducking classes.

Your article "Convict applauded at graduation event" on September 20 refers. It is pleasing to see offenders taking their education seriously. It is also a challenge to our youth who are dicing with their future by ducking classes.

Moses Taunyane, 43, who is serving his sentence in Modderbee Correctional Centre, did not allow prison to stop him from studying. And it is all due to dedication and rehabilitation programmes offered by the Correctional Services Department nationwide.

The department, other stakeholders and NGOs are doing a sterling job to ensure that rehabilitation takes place, but offenders also need community involvement.

For too long now, prisons were regarded as breeding grounds of criminality, places of punitive authoritarianism and backwaters of everything despised by society. The correction of offending behaviour is based on the promotion of social responsibility.

Taunyane and 64 other offenders are reaping the rewards of rehabilitation. The constitutional imperative for schooling is not a right that is curtailed by incarceration and between the Education Department and Correctional Services, literacy, schooling and basic adult education are priorities.

Well done to Taunyane and all the other offenders.

Tshifhiwa Magadani, Pretoria