Nearly seven years ago, in May 2016, the former home secretary Kenneth Clarke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there was an “absurd” prison sentence currently in operation in Britain that meant thousands of those subject to it had absolutely no idea when, if ever, they would be released. The situation, he said, was “ridiculous.” It still is.
He was talking about the imprisonment for public protection sentence, better known simply as IPP, which has plagued the British legal and penal landscape for the past two decades. It was first introduced by the Labour home secretary David Blunkett through a white paper entitled Justice for All and was intended to “ensure that dangerous, violent and sexual offenders stay in custody for as long as they present a risk to the public”.
