It cannot be right that there are still 2,400 prisoners in Britain who are detained, with no date given for their release, under a law that was repealed in 2012 because it was so self-evidently cruel and counterproductive.
The coalition government scrapped the law allowing judges to impose sentences of “imprisonment for public protection” (IPP) for offenders who were neither guilty of murder nor mentally ill, but who were regarded as a danger to the public.
It was widely regarded as a mistake, including by Lord Blunkett, the home secretary who introduced it, by many of the judges who imposed IPP sentences, and by Lord Thomas, the former lord chief justice of England and Wales. It was used more often than Lord Blunkett intended, including for relatively trivial offences such as stealing a mobile phone or a laptop.
It had a disastrous effect on the mental health of many of those who felt they had been jailed without hope – for whom the only way out was to prove a negative to the Parole Board: that they were no longer a threat to society.
Some of these prisoners have now served nearly 20 years, while thousands of people convicted of more serious offences have long since been released. In the 18 months of the Labour government alone, thousands more prisoners, many of them also guilty of more serious offences than IPP prisoners, have been released early to ease overcrowding.
Simply stating the facts of the injustice suffered by these prisoners ought to be enough to persuade Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, David Lammy, the justice secretary, and Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, to end it. Unfortunately, the fear of being blamed for the release of someone who then goes on to commit a terrible crime has prevented them from doing the right thing.
This is understandable but illogical. The government is releasing thousands of other prisoners early, any of whom could reoffend. And, as Lord Thomas says, it is wrong in principle to imprison anyone for what they might do rather than for what they have done.
We hope, therefore, that ministers will read Amy-Clare Martin’s powerful account of Haroon Ahmed’s experience of the IPP system. It does not seek to portray Mr Ahmed as blameless. He was given an IPP sentence at the age of 19 for his part in a robbery, after what was already a long history of offending since the age of 12.
He reacted badly when the Parole Board refused, without interviewing him, to release him after he served the minimum of two-and-a-half years. He escaped several times, each time landing himself in more trouble with the courts. He says he was “fighting the system” as he refused to accept the open-ended sentence.
He was eventually released after 12 years, but he was returned to jail a year later after he was convicted of actual bodily harm – and his indefinite sentence resumed. Unlike some other IPP prisoners who were driven ever deeper into despair, however, Mr Ahmed matured, completing GCSEs and A-levels behind bars and finally, three years ago, launching an appeal against his original sentence.
In November last year, by which time he was aged 37, the Court of Appeal freed him, concluding that “the imposition of the sentence of second-last resort on this young applicant was not justified”. His IPP sentence – the sentence of “second-last resort” – was quashed and replaced with a five-year term, which he had already served. After 18 years he returned home to Derby a free man.
His is just one man’s story, but it shines an unforgiving light on hundreds of similar cases. “We are basically hostages,” Mr Ahmed told The Independent. “We have grown from teenagers to men, and we are watching people with much worse offending come to custody and be released.”
It is time for Lord Timpson, Mr Lammy and Sir Keir to right this terrible wrong.
