Locked up – just in case
Where is the justice in being imprisoned – before commiting a crime?
As the Justice Bill goes to the committee stage in parliament, support is growing for a thorough reform of the system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPP). The prime minister has announced an urgent review of the sentence and has promised to bring forward proposals in the autumn as part of the government’s justice reforms. Under the system of IPPs, people who have been sent to prison cannot be released, even after they have served the minimum tariff of their sentences, until they can convince a parole board that they will not re-offend when they leave jail.
These prisoners are in preventative detention – being punished for future offences that they have not committed. The number of people sentenced to IPPs has far exceeded what was intended when the sentence was introduced in 2005.
IPP prisoners are adding to the growing problem of overcrowding in British prisons. On 17 November 2010 there were 6,375 prisoners serving an indeterminate IPP sentence or Detention for Public Protection – 3,173 of those prisoners are held beyond their tariff expiry date.
In order to have any chance of being released on parole, IPP prisoners are entirely reliant on demonstrating their risk reduction while in prison. Many IPP prisoners, because of the lack of resources for risk-reduction courses, cannot get on the behavioural courses that they need to attend as a virtual condition of release. The situation is even worse for prisoners who are mentally ill and those with learning disabilities because they are barred from attending offending behaviour programmes, thus effectively blocking their one means of exit from this unjust maze.
In 2008, the then Labour government was forced to raise the minimum tariff for people sentenced to an IPP to two years to limit the relentless rise in the IPP prison population, which was placing an impossible burden on the prison service and Parole Board. Since then the number of IPP sentences passed by the courts have continued at a rate of around seventy per month. The average cost of keeping a prisoner in jail is estimated at £45,000 per year.
The Prison Reform Trust has campaigned strongly on this issue. Juliet Lyon, Director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: ‘The government’s review is an opportunity to restore fairness and proportionality to our justice system and abolish this Kafkaesque sentence, which has attracted just about universal criticism from judges, parole board members, the prisons inspectorate, prison governors, staff, prisoners and families alike.”
A huge number of IPP prisoners remain in prison long after their tariff expiry date – yet without any opportunity to prove that they are no longer a danger to the public. The cost to the system and the unfair nature of the policy has prompted the announcement of a review from the government. But will a just and fair resolution of this injustice be forthcoming?
As the situation stands, people in Britain today are being locked up in case they commit a crime in the future. Many Quakers are concerned with this injustice. Others will be very surprised to learn of it. We tend to associate detention without trial with dictatorships or places such as Guantanamo Bay – not Britain in 2011.
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