IPPs: the prisoners serving never-ending jail sentences

In July 2000, eight-year-old Sarah Payne was murdered by Roy Whiting, a convicted paedophile who had been released early from a four-year sentence for abducting and assaulting a young girl. The resulting outcry was one reason why New Labour, keen to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", decided to design a new kind of precautionary sentence for dangerous offenders who weren't eligible for a life sentence.

The "sentence of imprisonment for public protection" (IPP) was introduced under the Criminal Justice Act 2003; it would be given to people convicted of one of 96 serious violent or sexual offences (carrying a maximum sentence of ten years or more) if the court thought the offender was a threat to the public. These people would serve a minimum period in custody, the "tariff", before they were eligible for parole. If the Parole Board decided they no longer posed a risk, the offender would be released on licence. But, in practice, they could be detained indefinitely; and even when released on licence, they could be recalled to prison.

The Labour government predicted that just a few hundred IPP sentences would be necessary each year, reserved for the most serious violent and sexual offences. But as a result of the way the law was structured – courts had to impose IPPs if the conditions were met – thousands were handed out, many for relatively minor offences. Serious problems were identified from the start, including the strain that they placed on the prison system. The IPP regime was reformed in 2008, to restrict its use by giving judges more discretion, and then abolished in 2012, after a highly critical European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgment. Even so, IPP sentences imposed before December 2012 remained in force.

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What effect did the policy have?

At the scheme’s height, some 6,000 people were in prison on IPP sentences. In total, 8,711 people (249 of them women) were given IPPs between 2005 and 2012. As of June this year, 2,796 people were still in prison serving one of these sentences; about 1,200 had been in jail continuously, while the majority had been recalled for breaching the terms of a release licence.

Crucially, many of the people given IPPs had committed relatively low-level crimes. In 2006, Martin Myers threatened a man who refused to give him a cigarette. He was given an IPP sentence with a tariff of 19 months and 27 days; 18 years later, he is still in prison. In 2007, Wayne Bell was sentenced for assaulting a boy and stealing his bike; he remains in prison. So too is Aaron Graham, who was sentenced in 2005 to two years and 124 days for punching a man in a fight; and Thomas White, who was sentenced for a minimum two years in 2012, for stealing a mobile phone.

Why are they still in prison?

Under the IPP regime, the burden of proof is on prisoners to prove to the Parole Board that they are no longer a threat to the public, before they have any chance of release – a burden described by former justice secretary Ken Clarke as "almost impossible" for some prisoners to meet. In many cases, prisoners have not had access to the resources they need to progress through the prison system: they are required to take offender behaviour and rehabilitation courses that are not available in some prisons. This was why, in the ECHR case (James, Wells and Lee v. UK), the Strasbourg court found that prisoners' right to the protection from unlawful deprivation of liberty had been violated. Furthermore, the psychological strain of IPPs makes rehabilitation even harder.

What sort of strain do they impose?

The "uncertainty inherent in the sentence" makes IPPs particularly psychologically damaging, noted a 2022 Commons Justice Committee report. "Due to release being conditional on parole," it continued, "there is no way for a prisoner to know when, if ever, they will be released." This often creates a vicious cycle: there is plenty of evidence that IPPs worsen inmates' mental health; but poor mental health is a risk factor for parole boards, so they are less likely to release prisoners. The campaign organisation the United Group for Reform of IPP says that 287 people who received an IPP sentence have died in prison. Ninety have taken their own lives. People serving IPP sentences are 2.6 times as likely as those serving life or determinate sentences to self-harm.

What is being done about this?

In 2022, the Commons committee recommended new legislation to allow all IPP prisoners still in jail to be "resentenced", saying that this was "the only way" to address this "unique injustice". However, the recommendation was rejected by then-justice secretary Dominic Raab, on the grounds that it "could lead to the immediate release of many offenders who have been assessed as unsafe for release by the Parole Board": the political risk of releasing prisoners who might go on to commit serious crimes is considerable. Raab's successor, Alex Chalk, unveiled a plan under which IPP offenders who had been released for certain periods will have their sentences "terminated" from next month – resulting in an estimated 1,800 sentences being terminated.

What about those still in prison?

The Labour government has so far also rejected the idea of resentencing all IPP prisoners, or amending the Parole Board test – apparently because of concerns over releasing dangerous prisoners. In principle, if not in practice, the IPP regime has been repudiated. David Blunkett, the Labour home secretary who introduced it, described it as the "biggest regret" of his career. Lord Brown, a former justice of the Supreme Court, called it a "stain" on British justice. Prisoners, he said, "are being punished for what they might do in future", and described this kind of "preventive detention" as "alien and inimical to our system of law".