This month marked an important milestone for a few hundred people serving IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences who have been released from prison and are on licence in the community. A change in the law implemented by the Victims and Prisoners Act has reduced the period that IPP prisoners must wait before they can apply for their licences to be terminated.
The IPP sentence is indefinite - it can last forever. Even though an IPP prisoner may have been released from custody, they remain at risk of being recalled to prison at any time. People are recalled for breaches of licence. This does not mean that they have reoffended. It can be that they have missed curfews or supervision appointments, relapsed into substance abuse, lost their accommodation...
Although it involves people losing their liberty, recall to prison is not a judicial decision - it is an administrative process. It is activated by the Probation Service and effectively rubber-stamped by civil servants in the Ministry of Justice. Recalled prisoners usually must wait many months for their detention to be reviewed by the Parole Board.
The threat of and reality of recall can be devastating for IPP prisoners. It can prevent them getting on with their lives. For some, the torment of this can be intolerable. Matthew Price was unable to bear the pain. My colleague, Emma McClure, has written powerfully about Matthew for whom the change in the law came too late.
At the beginning of this month, the Ministry of Justice began referring hundreds of IPP cases to the Parole Board for consideration of termination of their licence.
Yesterday we received decisions for two of our clients.
One of these was sentenced 20 years ago in the first wave of IPP sentences. His tariff (minimum term) was less than two years. When I met him in 2017, he was in a Category A prison. He had been in around 30 different prisons. He is autistic and struggled terribly with the social dynamics which are a feature of most prisons.
He served over 16 years before his first release from custody. He was recalled less than a week later. It took 15 months for the Parole Board to review his case. They decided he should never have been recalled in the first place.
This month marked two years since he was released for the second time. He has been doing brilliantly. We made submissions to the Parole Board arguing that his sentence should finally come to an end.
We received his decision yesterday - his IPP licence has finally been terminated.
The second case for which we received a decision yesterday was for a man who had been given an IPP in 2008. He has serious learning difficulties and has struggled with his mental health. He spent several years in hospital where I first met him in 2019. He was released for the first time at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. He had served around 8 years over his tariff.
He was released to supported accommodation where he did well for 18 months. He had a blip then and, because he was sure he would be returned to prison, he left the accommodation and slept rough in a tent in the woods for a few months. He did nothing wrong during this period but, when the weather got cold, he handed himself in and was recalled to prison. He waited 18 months in prison for a parole hearing before being re-released last summer to the same supported accommodation. They were happy to have him back.
We submitted an application for his licence to be terminated at the end of January. Yesterday we learned that this application had been successful.
I got to tell both these guys that they were finally free. This is one of the best parts of this job.
Hope is a precious thing. It has been all but extinguished for many IPP prisoners. Many hundreds are still in prison with no idea when they will be released. Many hundreds are walking the tightrope in the community, riddled with anxiety, trying to avoid being recalled. I hope they can hang on.
Andrew Sperling
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