The 100-Year Life Health Education and Government
An open letter backed by 70 criminal justice experts has called on Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, to honour Labour’s commitment to make urgent reforms to “indefinite imprisonment” sentences to help reduce overcrowding in prisons. IPP sentences were introduced under Tony Blair’s New Labour in 2005 but were axed in 2012 due to widespread agreement that they were unfair. More than a decade on, around 3,000 people are still serving IPP sentences, including 700 who have served ten or more years beyond their original minimum tariff. Campaigners claim that resentencing IPP prisoners would be a “tangible, politically palatable” way to reduce the prison population. “[Labour] recognise they created the problem in the first place and there is a pressure to do something about it,” said Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. It’s a start.
