Why won't ministers undo this 'stain on the justice system'?
Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences were scrapped in 2012 - but thousands still languish in prison because of them. It's high time the government did something about it.
Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) may sound like prison sentences that the public might endorse for their own protection. Yet this sentencing regime has ended up incarcerating thousands of people for effectively minor offences, and was so ill-conceived that it was abolished in 2012. However, this move was not retrospective, so almost 3,000 people still languish in prison long after they have served their time for the original crime. Of these, hundreds originally had tariffs of less than two years for relatively minor offenses like theft, but decades later, remain behind bars. Even if released, they are forced to live under the incredibly stringent licensing conditions; petty infringements can mean even more jail time.
This scandal is at last getting public attention, and to help shine a light on the issue, we are delighted to feature a guest post by Charley Allan, secretariat for the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group.
The issue will be debated in the House of Lords on Tuesday 12 March. For more background, you can watch this short explainer video by lawyer Peter Stefanovic, CEO of the Campaign for Social Justice, that has clocked up over 13.6million views in just months. You can also listen to this excellent podcast series: Trapped: The IPP Prisoner Scandal on Apple Podcasts.
Claire Fox
IPP has become a byword for injustice. Created in 2003 and then abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively, Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences included a ‘tariff’ – or minimum time to be spent in prison – followed by an open-ended period of incarceration, the idea being that those serving an IPP would be released only after they’d shown they were no longer a risk to the public.
But far more IPP sentences were handed down than ever anticipated, while the courses and suggested rehabilitation services needed by prisoners to prove they were safe were often unavailable. And for many, the longer they were imprisoned without an end date, the further their mental health deteriorated – which was then often used against them as evidence they weren’t fit for release.
Lord Blunkett, who created the IPP sentence as home secretary, said in 2021: ‘I got it wrong. The government now have the chance to get it right.’ He is working with families of IPP prisoners such as Thomas White, who was sentenced to a two-year minimum term in 2012 for stealing a mobile phone, but has remained in prison for the past 12 years.
As of 30 June last year, 1,140 IPP prisoners were five years or more over tariff, 662 were 10 years or more, and 67 were at least 15 years beyond the minimum. Almost 3,000 people with IPPs are still in prison, of whom around 1,200 of whom have never been released. The rest have been recalled to prison – often not for committing a further offence – during the stringent 10-year post-release licence period, described as yet another form of psychological torture.
The government, to its credit, is proposing to reduce the licence length to three years with an amendment to its own Victims and Prisoners Bill, currently in the House of Lords. But it refuses to accept the key recommendation of the Justice Select Committee, when it called last year for an expert panel to oversee a mass resentencing exercise for IPP prisoners to escape this horrific limbo of injustice.
The UN special rapporteur for torture, Dr Alice Jill Edwards, also supports a resentencing exercise, pointing out: 'A process to allow those remaining in prison to be resentenced would definitively lead to this terrible chapter in the UK’s criminal justice system being closed. The chair of the Justice Select Committee, Sir Bob Neill - a widely respected Tory who’s standing down at the next election - proposed resentencing as an amendment to the same Bill in the Commons last December, but neither the government nor Labour would support it, on the grounds of public protection.
Dr Edwards calls this argument 'misleading’, however, because 'the UK, like any society with a strong rule of law, has measures to protect the community after prisoners are released’. Indeed, the rightful release of thousands of people should never be blocked on the grounds that a handful of them might commit crimes in the future – or as Dr Edwards puts it, 'locking people up and “throwing away the keys” is not a legal or moral solution’.
Some of the most harrowing evidence given to the Justice Committee concerns the psychological profile of people serving IPP sentences, with one consultant forensic psychiatrist explaining: 'Their clinical presentation is increasingly akin to those who have been wrongfully convicted.’ Dr Edwards herself calls it 'tragic that many mental-health challenges appear to have been caused or at least aggravated by the uncertainty of indeterminate sentences’. And at the heart of the IPP scandal is a philosophical problem: can anyone really ever prove they present no risk to the public?
Prison and probation officers are in no doubt about the injustice of IPPs. The Prison Officers Association has highlighted the pressure on their members of dealing with the 'hopelessness’ of IPP prisoners, while the National Association of Probation Officers points out they 'generally tend to suffer from personality disorders, anxiety and depression and other mental-health issues at a higher rate than others in the prison system’. Both unions fully support a mass resentencing exercise.
Parliament is set to debate IPPs again on Tuesday 12 March, when peers scrutinise a raft of amendments, including a repeat of Sir Bob’s resentencing proposal to be moved by Baroness Fox. All eyes will be on Labour and whether the party’s position has changed since shadow minister Kevin Brennan raised concerns in the Commons last year that, 'given the impact of the government’s effective destruction of the criminal justice system, we lack the infrastructure and resources to keep the public safe should [resentencing] be implemented immediately’.
To address these concerns, Earl Attlee, the Conservative grandson of Labour’s great postwar prime minister, has tabled his own amendment to Baroness Fox’s, which seeks to delay the resentencing exercise until ministers are ‘satisfied that the Probation Service has the capacity and resources to protect the public’. The Attlee amendment also instructs the government to 'commission a thematic review by the Chief Inspector of Probation that considers the extent to which probation services have the capacity and resources to manage additional supervision as a result of resentencing’. Campaigners hope this compromise could unlock Labour resistance by making the Justice Committee’s proposal more palatable.
The secretary of state for justice, Alex Chalk, who himself has called IPPs a 'stain on the justice system’, rejects resentencing as too great a risk to the public. The justice minister in the house of Lords, Lord Bellamy, also cited public safety at the Bill’s Second Reading in December: ’The basic problem with the resentencing exercise is that you are raising expectations that people will be released. But the people we are dealing with have been found not to be safe to be released, so how are we going to tackle that?’
His Conservative colleague, Lord Moylan, who is currently leading the parliamentary fight against IPP injustice, hit back: 'The Prison Service releases, daily, people into the community who would be assessed as dangerous if the government had the option of retaining them in custody. That is because they have reached the end of a definitive sentence. It is a risk that we have learned to manage.’
Lord Moylan is absolutely correct, and he summed up the Government’s confusion and contradiction perfectly by pointing out: 'The minister made a great deal of the principle of public protection, but those are not the words over the door when he goes into his office. The words over the door say, “Ministry of Justice”.’
Peers now all need to stand up for justice (not to mention mercy), back resentencing, and put MPs on the spot when the Bill returns. And with the Government’s majority continuing to dwindle, it only takes a couple of dozen Tory rebels to win in the Commons and wipe away this stain of injustice for good.
Charley Allan provides the secretariat for the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group, which is supported by the Prison Officers Association, the National Association of Probation Officers, the PCS and UCU trade unions, and the Police Federation of England & Wales.