On 9 February 2023 the government finally responded to the parliamentary Justice Committee’s September 2022 report on indefinite sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP). JOHN BOWDEN reports.
The Justice Committee said that IPP sentences were ‘irredeemably flawed’ and ‘caused hopelessness and despair that gave rise to heightening levels of self-harm and suicide among the IPP cohort of prisoners’. The Committee’s main recommendation was the judicial resentencing of all IPP prisoners to more appropriate determinate sentences.
The IPP sentence was introduced by the Labour government of Tony Blair and came into force in 2005. Although officially scrapped in 2012, nearly 3,000 people remain in prison under the IPP law, with almost half of them having been recalled to prison following their earlier release, usually for minor, non-criminal breaches of parole licence conditions.
The government rejected the recommendation. A statement issued by the Secretary of State for Justice Dominic Raab declared that ‘Retrospective resentencing of IPP offenders could lead to the immediate release of many offenders who have been assessed as unsafe for release by the Parole Board, many with no period of supervision in the community. The Government’s long-held view is that this would give rise to an unacceptable risk to public protection… As such, the Government has no plans to conduct a resentencing exercise.’
Committee Chair and Conservative MP Bob Neill responded: ‘We are not only disappointed with the government’s response but genuinely surprised. There is now a growing consensus that a resentencing exercise is the only way to comprehensively address the injustice of the IPP sentences and that this can be done without prejudicing public opinion. But the government has not listened and as a result, these people will remain held in an unsustainable limbo.’
The reality is that the government’s response is not a surprise. In the current times of capitalist economic crisis and potential social unrest, this right-wing Tory government is determined to further increase its use of prisons and the ‘criminal justice system’ as a weapon against the working class. Vying as always with the Conservatives for the accolade of ‘toughest on crime’, the Labour Party has, of course, been silent on this latest government refusal to release the prisoners of the IPP system which it created.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 293 April/May 2023
