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”.
It was enshrined in law by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and started to be used in April 2005. Part of a sentencing arms race between New Labour and the Conservatives as to who could be the toughest on law and order, it was an ill-thought-out and poorly devised legislative blunder.
Any offender convicted of one of 96 specified serious offences could be considered by the courts to qualify for an IPP sentence. The offences ranged from actual bodily harm to arson and robbery. A minimum tariff would be set by a judge and the Parole Board would decide whether the offender was no longer a risk to the public and could be released.
One serious problem was the operational dysfunction between how Blunkett had envisaged the implementation of IPP sentences, and how the judiciary interpreted the legislation. As a result of this confusion, IPP sentences were given out like confetti by the judiciary: between 2005 and 2013 a total of 8,711 such sentences were passed.
I was given one of them when I was – I maintain wrongly, but that’s another story – convicted, after a retrial, of conspiracy to rob and possession of firearms at Chelmsford crown court in 2010. I received an IPP sentence with a minimum tariff of 12 years.
During my time inside I have acquired a first class BA honours degree from the Open University and a diploma in scriptwriting, and have recently researched and written two more books. I have now been incarcerated for 15 years – three years longer than my tariff. I have been twice recommended for progression into open conditions and twice turned down by the Ministry of Justice on the grounds that “the Parole Board have not provided a wholly persuasive case to transfer to open conditions at this time”.
More than a decade ago, in 2012, three prisoners serving IPP sentences took a case against the government to the European court of human rights (ECHR). In that case of James, Wells and Lee v UK, the ECHR unanimously found that there had been a violation of article 5, section 1 of the convention. This was in relation to the “protection from unlawful deprivation of liberty”. The court ruled that IPPs were “arbitrary and therefore unlawful”.
The most effective intervention, however, was instigated by Clarke, who as justice secretary had negotiated the abolition of “the wretched sentence” in 2012. As he would later tell the Today programme, when he was by then a backbench MP: “It is quite absurd that there are people who might be in prison for the rest of their lives, in theory, who are serving a sentence which parliament agreed to get rid of because it hadn’t worked as anybody intended.” (IPP applies to England and Wales; Scotland has a similar system, the Order for Lifelong Restriction.)
Many people serving IPPs look for coping mechanisms to survive the hopelessness embedded within the sentence. Some go down the rebellious route; others seek solace in psychoactive drugs and attendant self-harming; still others take their own lives. Recently, in a cry for help, one IPP prisoner took all the medication he had in his possession and dived off his bed head-first on to the concrete floor. Others have set fire to their cells, or slashed their faces with makeshift weapons. The Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody found that, since the onset of IPP in 2005 and as of May 2021, a total of 250 such prisoners have died, 65 by their own hand.
These sentences have an equally devastating effect on the families and friends of prisoners, as they find themselves in limbo with no release date in sight. Many families turn to their MPs, some of whom are excellent but others, such as mine, no longer even reply to letters.
IPP was placed in the spotlight by parliament’s justice committee last year in an evidence-based report that held it was “irredeemably flawed” and called for a comprehensive and viable resentencing exercise. The committee found that there were still 2,926 people imprisoned under IPP, of whom 608 had been in jail for more than a decade beyond their original tariff.
The committee chair, Sir Bob Neill, noted: “IPP sentences were abolished a decade ago but little has been done to deal with the long-term consequences on those subject to them … The decision must be made once and for all to end the legacy of IPP sentences and come up with a solution that is proportionate to offenders while protecting the public.” Shamefully, the government has rejected its proposal.
From the very outset, IPP was an ill-conceived political concept, and although it was partially abolished, the government has stood by and let many men and women pay the price for not abolishing it in its entirety. The time has come for the government to end this interminable legislative blunder.
Terence Smith is a former armed robber, currently in HMP Warren Hill, and the author of several books
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