The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners?
There are those of us who exist in a more or less free society. And there are those who, while also living within the borders of the United Kingdom, exist in a police state. If the rest of us knew these people existed and what was being done to them in our name, we would scarcely believe it.
No one, including Victoria Carter (an assumed name), would deny that her crimes warranted a significant prison sentence. She had come from a terrible place: a father who beat her up, an alcoholic mother whose friends sexually abused her, extreme poverty as all the money was spent on drink. As a young teenager, she ran away from home, after which she had more than 10 placements in foster care and care homes. She responded with anger, violence and self-destruction.
As a teenager, she was convicted of criminal damage and burglary. She tried to kidnap a man she believed had abused her younger sister. She then went through a phase of alcoholism, during which she had sex with two underage teenagers, leading to a conviction for sexual offences. In an alcoholic rage, she set light to photos of her mother, scorching the carpet of her lodgings and earning herself an arson conviction.
In 2007, in her early twenties, she was prosecuted for actual bodily harm, among other offences. Her lawyer told her to expect a sentence of up to four years. This, the judge remarked, was roughly what she would have got under different circumstances: three and a half years. But instead he handed down a sentence of “imprisonment for public protection” (IPP).
IPP sentences were introduced in England and Wales by the New Labour government as it sought to prove it was tough on law and order in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. If an offender had previously been convicted of one of 153 offences deemed to present a danger to the public, and had then committed another such crime, the courts had no choice but to impose either an IPP sentence or life imprisonment. IPP means indefinite detention.
The crimes that qualified were wide-ranging. One defendant received an IPP sentence with a minimum term of just 28 days, but extended indefinitely. Another was imprisoned with a tariff of two years for stealing a bicycle. He served 12 and is now in a mental health institution.
These sentences included a “tariff”: the period after which the prisoner could be assessed for release. Victoria’s was 21 months. But IPP sentences carry a presumption against parole. Rather than the Parole Board having to prove that a prisoner presents a danger to the public, the prisoner has to prove that they don’t. As the then justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said in 2011: “It is almost impossible for the prisoner to prove that, so … hardly any are released.”
Those who do manage to get out face a “life licence”, which cannot be reviewed for at least 10 years. The licence conditions are extremely strict. Released IPP prisoners can be sent back for infractions as petty as a missed probation appointment because their bus did not arrive, or even because the support service they were instructed to use no longer exists
In 2012, after widespread condemnation and a ruling by the European court of human rights that such sentences were “arbitrary and therefore unlawful”, IPP terms were abolished by the Conservative government. But the measure was not retrospective. As of the end of last year, 2,892 IPP prisoners remained behind bars. Almost 97% were more than two years beyond their tariff date; nearly half were 10 years beyond. Victoria was released at the beginning of this year, after serving more than 15 yearsof a 21-month tariff.
The former supreme court justice Lord Brown has called IPP sentences “the greatest single stain on the justice system”. When Michael Gove was justice secretary, he recommended “executive clemency” for IPP prisoners who had served terms much longer than their tariffs. But he didn’t act on it. David Blunkett, the Labour home secretary who introduced the sentences, regrets them, stating: “I got it wrong. The government now have the chance to get it right.”
But the government, always glancing at the media, refuses to take it. In February, it rejected the recommendation of the House of Commons justice committee that remaining IPP prisoners should be resentenced. Successive justice secretaries have failed to use the power they acquired in 2012 to introduce a presumption of release. So while people who committed far worse crimes come and go, IPP prisoners are forgotten, cast into a judicial oubliette from which some might never emerge.
The effects on their mental health of never knowing when or whether they might be released can be devastating. Rates of self-harm among these prisoners are more than twice as high as among prisoners serving life sentences.
In March 2008, when she began to understand what her sentence really meant, Victoria tried to kill herself, and very nearly succeeded. But then she became determined to sort herself out. She took every available course of psychotherapy and counselling, sat GCSE exams and started an Open University degree. She knew she wasn’t ready for parole when her tariff ended. Two years later, she didn’t qualify on the grounds that, through her own choice, she was still taking a psychotherapeutic course. But after a further two years, when she came up for parole again, she had turned her life around. Unfortunately, the standards of proof required for parole were impossible to meet.
Her application was refused and she spiralled into despair. She lost three and a half stone, started self-harming and taking drugs. She attempted suicide again. She became trapped in a vicious cycle. Being refused parole causes severe mental health problems for IPP prisoners, but mental illness is one of the criteria for the refusal of parole. So down they spiral. Instead of seeking help, some try to hide their problems from staff so as not to jeopardise their chances. Severe cuts have restricted the courses these prisoners can take, without which they have no hope of release.
Victoria is a remarkable woman: honest about what she was and what she did, acutely aware of the pain she caused, determined to lead a useful and purposeful life. But, close to 40, she is constantly confronted by the missing years. “I deserved to be punished,” she told me. “But did I deserve more than 15 years? No. I have days when I just sob in my bed. Just to get out some of the sadness of what I have lost.”
A great wrong has been done. Almost everyone in power accepts it is wrong. But none are prepared to address it.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
There are those of us who exist in a more or less free society. And there are those who, while also living within the borders of the United Kingdom, exist in a police state. If the rest of us knew these people existed and what was being done to them in our name, we would scarcely believe it.
No one, including Victoria Carter (an assumed name), would deny that her crimes warranted a significant prison sentence. She had come from a terrible place: a father who beat her up, an alcoholic mother whose friends sexually abused her, extreme poverty as all the money was spent on drink. As a young teenager, she ran away from home, after which she had more than 10 placements in foster care and care homes. She responded with anger, violence and self-destruction.
As a teenager, she was convicted of criminal damage and burglary. She tried to kidnap a man she believed had abused her younger sister. She then went through a phase of alcoholism, during which she had sex with two underage teenagers, leading to a conviction for sexual offences. In an alcoholic rage, she set light to photos of her mother, scorching the carpet of her lodgings and earning herself an arson conviction.
In 2007, in her early twenties, she was prosecuted for actual bodily harm, among other offences. Her lawyer told her to expect a sentence of up to four years. This, the judge remarked, was roughly what she would have got under different circumstances: three and a half years. But instead he handed down a sentence of “imprisonment for public protection” (IPP).
IPP sentences were introduced in England and Wales by the New Labour government as it sought to prove it was tough on law and order in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. If an offender had previously been convicted of one of 153 offences deemed to present a danger to the public, and had then committed another such crime, the courts had no choice but to impose either an IPP sentence or life imprisonment. IPP means indefinite detention.
The crimes that qualified were wide-ranging. One defendant received an IPP sentence with a minimum term of just 28 days, but extended indefinitely. Another was imprisoned with a tariff of two years for stealing a bicycle. He served 12 and is now in a mental health institution.
These sentences included a “tariff”: the period after which the prisoner could be assessed for release. Victoria’s was 21 months. But IPP sentences carry a presumption against parole. Rather than the Parole Board having to prove that a prisoner presents a danger to the public, the prisoner has to prove that they don’t. As the then justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said in 2011: “It is almost impossible for the prisoner to prove that, so … hardly any are released.”
Those who do manage to get out face a “life licence”, which cannot be reviewed for at least 10 years. The licence conditions are extremely strict. Released IPP prisoners can be sent back for infractions as petty as a missed probation appointment because their bus did not arrive, or even because the support service they were instructed to use no longer exists
In 2012, after widespread condemnation and a ruling by the European court of human rights that such sentences were “arbitrary and therefore unlawful”, IPP terms were abolished by the Conservative government. But the measure was not retrospective. As of the end of last year, 2,892 IPP prisoners remained behind bars. Almost 97% were more than two years beyond their tariff date; nearly half were 10 years beyond. Victoria was released at the beginning of this year, after serving more than 15 yearsof a 21-month tariff.
The former supreme court justice Lord Brown has called IPP sentences “the greatest single stain on the justice system”. When Michael Gove was justice secretary, he recommended “executive clemency” for IPP prisoners who had served terms much longer than their tariffs. But he didn’t act on it. David Blunkett, the Labour home secretary who introduced the sentences, regrets them, stating: “I got it wrong. The government now have the chance to get it right.”
But the government, always glancing at the media, refuses to take it. In February, it rejected the recommendation of the House of Commons justice committee that remaining IPP prisoners should be resentenced. Successive justice secretaries have failed to use the power they acquired in 2012 to introduce a presumption of release. So while people who committed far worse crimes come and go, IPP prisoners are forgotten, cast into a judicial oubliette from which some might never emerge.
The effects on their mental health of never knowing when or whether they might be released can be devastating. Rates of self-harm among these prisoners are more than twice as high as among prisoners serving life sentences.
In March 2008, when she began to understand what her sentence really meant, Victoria tried to kill herself, and very nearly succeeded. But then she became determined to sort herself out. She took every available course of psychotherapy and counselling, sat GCSE exams and started an Open University degree. She knew she wasn’t ready for parole when her tariff ended. Two years later, she didn’t qualify on the grounds that, through her own choice, she was still taking a psychotherapeutic course. But after a further two years, when she came up for parole again, she had turned her life around. Unfortunately, the standards of proof required for parole were impossible to meet.
Her application was refused and she spiralled into despair. She lost three and a half stone, started self-harming and taking drugs. She attempted suicide again. She became trapped in a vicious cycle. Being refused parole causes severe mental health problems for IPP prisoners, but mental illness is one of the criteria for the refusal of parole. So down they spiral. Instead of seeking help, some try to hide their problems from staff so as not to jeopardise their chances. Severe cuts have restricted the courses these prisoners can take, without which they have no hope of release.
Victoria is a remarkable woman: honest about what she was and what she did, acutely aware of the pain she caused, determined to lead a useful and purposeful life. But, close to 40, she is constantly confronted by the missing years. “I deserved to be punished,” she told me. “But did I deserve more than 15 years? No. I have days when I just sob in my bed. Just to get out some of the sadness of what I have lost.”
A great wrong has been done. Almost everyone in power accepts it is wrong. But none are prepared to address it.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Labour need to be questioned about this . Will they right the wrong?
ReplyDeleteNo, especially not under Sir Keir.
Delete
ReplyDeleteFrom the 15 May debate 1
Mr Carmichael - The volume and nature of the interventions on the Secretary of State show the difficulty of this area of law. While the changes to parole are welcome, is there not a danger that they will increase further the treatment of those who are currently in the system and those who are still in the prison system—somewhere in the region of 3,000 people—more than 10 years after we abolished sentences of imprisonment for public protection? The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who I see in his place, has called for a review. Sir John Major did the same recently. Would this Bill not be an opportunity to deal with that?
Alex Chalk - It is important to consider these things separately, but the right hon. Gentleman identifies something that is a stain on our justice system. The IPP system should never have happened. Trying to take the politics out of it, I sort of understand why it was proposed, but it was a bad idea. It was a big mistake, and it has left us with a difficult issue. I am considering carefully what the Justice Committee has to say about it, and I will be saying more about it in due course.
From the 15 May debate 2
ReplyDeleteSir Robert Neill - The Victims and Prisoners Bill makes no mention of the continuing injustice, as the Secretary of State rightly said—the blot and stain on our judicial landscape—facing a particular class of prisoner: those imprisoned for public protection. The House recognised that indeterminate sentences had failed and so abolished them, but not retrospectively. An increasing number of people on open-ended sentences, which Parliament has abolished, are being recalled. People have no hope of their sentence coming to an end and, because they are also potentially subject to a life licence, more people have been recalled than are serving their original sentence. Something has gone badly wrong here, which is doubtless why Lord Blunkett, the creator of the sentence, said, “This has gone wrong and needs to be changed.” It is also why Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, a former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and not someone generally regarded as a soft touch in sentencing matters, said, “The only logical way to resolve this is to have a resentencing exercise.”
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) - I speak as an old boy of the Justice Committee. I do not want to rehearse the debate we had only a few weeks ago, but there seems to be some reticence among those on both Front Benches about the proposals the hon. Gentleman put forward through the Select Committee; they seem to think that they would result in the large-scale release of dangerous prisoners. Could he emphasise exactly what the Select Committee was proposing: a panel of experts carefully preparing a way forward on resentencing that balances public protection and the rights of the victims, with securing justice? That has the wholehearted support of organisations on the frontline, including the Prison Officers Association, the probation officers, the courts staff and, as he said, the former Home Secretary and the Supreme Court judge. This needs to be addressed now. If we do not use this Bill to introduce such a measure, we will lose the opportunity, possibly for another number of years.
From the 15 May debate 3
ReplyDeleteSir Robert Neill - The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right and I agree with him. We are in a hopeless situation at the moment and there has been a misunderstanding. The Select Committee took careful evidence and made a number of recommendations, not purely on resentencing, but on a number of other practical measures that may be taken to improve the way in which IPP prisoners are dealt with in the system. Frankly, at the moment, they are set up to fail. They have to go on courses, which they are told about only a few weeks before their parole hearing and the course waiting list is two years in some places, we are told. They may be in a prison where the courses do not exist or are not available. They are then on permanent licence, where they can be recalled at any time. There is scope to have that removed after 10 years. We can see no evidence as to why the period should not be five years, rather than 10. If somebody has shown willing and gone straight for five years, there is no evidence to suggest that going on for 10 makes any difference to the reoffending rate. So why do that? Why set people up to fail?
On the resentencing exercise, as the right hon. Gentleman rightly says, we were not at all seeking to say, “Everybody will be resentenced immediately. Everybody will be released immediately.” Having acted in some cases that involved sentences of this kind, I know that some people will always remain very dangerous. There are some people who, by the nature of the index offence, will remain in prison for a long time and the determinate sentence that they ultimately receive under our scheme may be a very long one. So the idea that that approach opens the doors is wrong. What it does do is give certainty to everybody and give hope. Tragically, I was informed that, in the four weeks after the former Secretary of State rejected the entirely of the serious recommendations of the Select Committee, three IPP prisoners took their own lives. I hope that there was no connection there, but it does not say much for the sensitivity with which this has been handled in the past. I know that that is not the view of this Secretary of State, who is a deeply humane man and will want to do justice by this.
The resentencing exercise is not something that can be done quickly. It would require an expert panel of people, including lawyers, to say how best to do it and to work it through. I beg the Secretary of State to think again about using this opportunity. I have had a clause drafted that would give effect to the Select Committee’s recommendation. I would much prefer it if the Government said, “We will pre-empt that and bring forward our own proposals to set up an expert panel.” That may take some time and it may not come into effect for a period, but it would at least give people hope that something serious was being done, that work was being followed up and that there was a willingness to look at the matter again; I would have thought that that was only fair. Equally, it cannot be fair that soon some people will have served longer than the maximum sentence for the offence of which they were convicted. That cannot be just. This is not being soft. It is just being fair and just and that is part of the balance of the system.
Kidnapping, arson, violence. Sounds like the IPP was the right sentence. IPPs we’re applied correctly for some.
ReplyDeleteCan't blame the current incumbent for some of it. He was not blessed with a legitimate hand over. He had no real chance to learn Napo values then instilled his own brand of nepotism because he is afraid to challenge. His examples were ledgergate and he had little confidence not realising the management sea change to change probation. IPP at least meant we were the place for such work. Although contrary to our value base at the time today we are glad for any offender recognition.
DeleteOnce upon a time far far ago...NAPO would have been loudly demonstrating against the injustice of IPP sentences
ReplyDeleteOff topic Housing crisis water sewage crisis thatcher Tory legacy we pay their profits and we pick up all the loss. Nasty party tories ruined everything.
ReplyDeleteAll true, and lets not forget Labour aren't much better.
Deletehttps://touch.policeoracle.com/news/article.cfm?id=111029
ReplyDeleteIPP was an inspired sentencing proposal from a power-crazed labour minister meaning targetted individuals were sentenced to a term of imprisonment, where that term was to be determined by the bitterness & resentment of political opportunism, with expert advice from bigots, ambitious civil servants & the voices of deeply wounded victims, amplified by right-wing journalists.
ReplyDeleteIt was such a politically useful sentence that NOT ONE SINGLE effort has been made by any government to re-sentence those subject to IPP.
It was the Brexit moment for the justice system of England & Wales, i.e. the point where right wing ideological influences outweighed any sense of humanity.
His whiney apology will never be enough while the Rt Hon the Lord Blunkett does fuck all to campaign to effect any change. Cameron on Blunkett:
"As a new back bencher, I will never forget coming to this place in 2001 and, in light of the appalling terrorist attacks that had taken place across the world, seeing the strong leadership he gave on the importance of keeping our country safe. He is a remarkable politician, a remarkable man."
UK Parliament: "Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP sentences) were available for courts to impose from 2005 to 2012. They were designed to detain offenders who posed a significant risk of causing serious harm to the public through further serious offences in prison until they no longer posed such a risk"
"In 2001 David became Home Secretary where he dealt with the changes in society that followed the September 11 attacks. After the 2005 general election he became Work and Pensions Secretary."
No-one with any influence or power gives a fuck about IPP or those entrapped by its Kafkaesque rules beyond using it as a platform for self-important blather when it might be useful.
Probation were/are complicit
In fact it seems 'probation' are deafeningly silent about the matter... "just following orders", perhaps?
DeleteAs well as being a Guardian columnist, a newspaper thats original owners were wealthy pro-condederacy (in other words, pro-slavery) mill owners, hes very much an establishment leftist - a leftist allowed onto state/corporate media, for the purpose of setting the limits of left wing debate. Much like Owen Jones.
ReplyDelete