On 28 July 2025 prisoner Joe Outlaw went on trial at Teeside Crown Court on 14 charges of committing criminal damage during a rooftop protest at Frankland prison in June 2023. The trial lasted until 5 August. Supporters attended court throughout, with a solidarity protest on the first day, attended by Joe’s friends, family and supporters, alongside representatives of Newcastle FRFI and Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association.
Joe Outlaw has campaigned constantly against the continuing imprisonment of prisoners like himself, detained under the Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP), a law abolished 13 years ago. First introduced by the ‘tough on crime’ Labour government in 2005, IPP was effectively a life sentence for ‘repeat offenders’ even for some convicted of relatively minor offences. While IPP prisoners were given minimum terms which they had to serve in prison, crucially their detention was unlimited after the expiry of those terms, dependent on the whims of the supposedly independent Parole Board. The IPP was scrapped in 2013; however, those already sentenced then remain incarcerated and still subject to its provisions. Joe’s own IPP has a four-year minimum tariff and yet he remains in prison 13 years later.
In 2022 the Justice Select Committee called on the government to resentence IPP prisoners still in prison, describing the sentence as ‘irredeemably flawed’. Both Tory and Labour governments have ignored the recommendations. In February 2025 Dr Alice Edwards, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, warned that these still incarcerated IPP prisoners are being subjected to ‘psychological torture’. The suicide rate among such prisoners is disproportionately high and 90 have so far killed themselves.
Joe Outlaw has spent seven years of his sentence in segregation units and on the prison ‘ghost train’, being moved between prisons 44 times in an attempt to break his resistance. In April 2023 he staged a 13-hour rooftop protest at Strangeways prison in Manchester after three IPP prisoners took their own lives in quick succession.
Following this protest, Joe was moved to high security HMP Frankland. Joe told the court that there he was dragged from his cell in the segregation unit by guards, pinned down and repeatedly punched and kicked, as his clothes were torn off him. He was then thrown into a strongbox strip cell. Joe told the court that ‘they thought they could get away with anything, including killing me, and I thought that I had to do something’. Although subsequently held in total solitary confinement, he amazingly managed to climb the fences and walls enclosing the segregation unit’s exercise yard and again publicly display his struggle against IPP.
After hearing Joe’s evidence, the jury acquitted him of 12 charges, convicting him on just two, for which he was sentenced to a further three years, three months in prison. After the verdict, Joe told his supporters: ‘Im not giving up. I’ll keep fighting for all those trapped in silence under IPP… and use the support that I’ve managed to generate to fuel the wider campaign against IPP. This is what keeps me focused and strong.’
Activists supporting the struggle of IPP prisoners for freedom from this draconian sentence will be protesting outside Parliament on 22 October.
More information at
@in_justice_ipp on Twitter
@in_justice_of_ipp on TikTok
John Bowden
FRFI 308 October/November 2025
