I have followed the Imprisonment for public protection (IPP) issue for over 10 years and seen how political inertia has stifled any chance of reform. But things are now changing. We are at an inflection point. To learn more, I listened to all episodes of the ‘Trapped: The IPP Scandal’ podcast series.

On 25 July 2023 one of its producers, Melissa Fitzgerald, contacted me and invited me to meet their entire team. This led to conducting an interview with two members, Hank Rossi (Consultant) and Sam Asumadu (Investigative Reporter).

10 minute read.

Faith: To what degree have you noticed how the IPP sentence has emerged as a major issue, and could even be stated as a tragedy within our Criminal Justice System?

Sam: I absolutely agree it’s a tragedy in our criminal justice system. Once you’ve done your original tariff, you’re basically being detained on what you might do rather than what you have done. To me, that’s something for science fiction, not a functional society. Preventative detention should not have had any place in British jurisprudence. The IPP sentence was abolished in 2012 on human rights grounds. Because it wasn’t retrospectively abolished, it’s meant that there’s this legacy and hangover of a particular time in British history, from the New Labour government.

Faith: You spoke with Lord Blunkett, was he dismissive or contrite in any way or genuinely mortified by the suffering caused by not only those given an IPP sentence but their families too. Could he have foreseen how this sentence would be implemented?

Sam: It’s hard to comprehend that this is where we are, over 80 people serving an IPP sentence have died in prison taking their own lives, so many people have been broken by what’s happened. Lord Blunkett has been quite vocal about the IPP, he has been contrite, and he has apologised. He does seem to care about the issue, whether that’s a matter of him thinking about his legacy or if it’s completely genuine, I don’t know. I can’t judge what’s in a man’s heart. However, it doesn’t quite matter how contrite he is because it’s still happened and a lot of lives have been destroyed and are still being destroyed, in my opinion. I think he believes that initially, at least, the judges were over applying the sentence to many people. I think it was just very bad legislation on his part and the Ministry’s part. You have to look at what may go wrong, the worst-case scenarios in legislation, because once it is out, it becomes part of bureaucracy, and into people’s hands. People are fallible, especially when it comes to prisons.

Faith: There were alternatives already. He didn’t need to bring in this new legislation.

Sam: He didn’t, but it did look good at the time. It sounded good as well and it was attractive to the people in the government. Finally, we’ll deal with the underclass.

Faith: How do you get beyond any concerns that you may have that your reporting will fall on deaf ears?

Sam: The series is a permanent record of what is an incredible failure of society. I think the authorities can’t hide from it now. We can send questions to Alex Chalk and Damian Hinds to keep pressure up, making sure they know people are watching. They can’t hide from us.

Faith: We are bombarded with messages from the media, be it on social media or in the newspapers. How do you get an audience to not just listen but act too?

Sam: Ultimately, it’s in their hands. We want people to act. What we’ve done is to highlight stories of people who are campaigning family members. They have little to no resources. Listening to that, I hope it makes people feel incumbent that they can do something themselves to help end this horrific tragedy. This could have happened to their family members too.

Faith: As a professional journalist you have an acute sense of right and wrong and fact from fiction. But has the topic of IPP gripped you because of any reason other than justice v injustice?

Sam: I can’t believe that the state thinks that they can keep on saying it’s “a stain on the British justice”, “stain on the conscience of the British Justice” and not rectify it. The state has a duty to care for prisoners whether they like it or not. Yet people have died and are dying on their watch. And I think that there should be some sort of accountability for that.

Faith: I understand prior to these podcasts, you were involved in a piece of research around IPPs with the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS). Can you outline the part you played?

Hank: I funded Zinc Productions and we’ve hired Steve, Melissa, and Samantha to do this work. We’ve worked with quite a lot of the families and friends of IPP’s and with a number of IPP sentenced individuals as well. I started a process with the researchers at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) in 2020. I approached them, having approached a number of criminal justice reform charities about this issue to fund some research on the possibility of an independent tribunal on IPP. Every time I looked further into this, I got more concerned. I almost, you know, started to become unwell myself, thinking this can’t be real.

One of the processes that I thought might help, was a sort of tribunal inquiry when power cannot hold itself to account because of nefarious activities of those who have it. You can get a group of citizens together and hold your own inquiry. That’s what I thought might be a useful way to look at the problems of IPP. Richard Garside and Roger Grimshaw from CCJS sat around the table with me and we came up with a plan to research the idea for an independent People’s Tribunal on indeterminate detention in the UK. That led to a document I was signing to invest some money in their work to research this idea.

I was sort of feeling like we’d achieved something just by having a conversation when so many people, organisations, and people in power were unwilling to talk about it. Richard and Roger took this seriously at the CCJS and we signed an agreement. The very next day, out of the blue, the government was going to be put under the spotlight by the Justice Select Committee as they launched their inquiry into IPPs.

Faith: Do you believe we live in a punitive society, which has then led to one of the flaws in the IPP sentence as assessing the dangerousness of each offender?

Hank: The short answer is yes. We live in a far too punitive society. I’ve just come across a document published by the Prison Reform Trust in 2003 where the writers are looking at sentence length and they’re worried that they are getting longer. Since then, we’ve gone to this extraordinary place now where a whole life tariff is an everyday thing. I call it the punitive ratchet. We are now learning about the significant harm that prison does to an individual. That’s perhaps what I would say about the punitive concept of prison. The way that we engage with it in the United Kingdom is toxic and has become more and more toxic in the 20 years since the millennium.

Assessing Dangerousness is a complex and very difficult business. You could argue that the assessments tools are inherently problematic because of the nature of prediction. That is a fundamental flaw in the idea of the IPP legislation in the first place to think that there was a system that you could implement to usefully predicts people’s behaviour in the future. And initially the whole process of IPP sentencing circumvented assessment for many. They were just labelled as dangerous based on the offence.

Faith: If you talk about dangerousness, this has changed throughout the sentence.

Hank: This is what annoys me endlessly about the fall back of “Oh, well, this person was a dangerous individual”, no, they weren’t necessarily in many of the cases. There is no evidence to me that people can be predictably relied upon to do the same thing in the future. You can say what a statistical likelihood is but that is nowhere near the same as knowing what someone will do. And we know that from the statistics, less than 1% of people go on to commit a serious further offence when they’ve been out of prison.

Faith: Is the IPP sentence a systemic miscarriage of justice?

Hank: Yes, that’s the best short description of it. Some people would say this is not a miscarriage of justice because that requires an individual to have been completely misrepresented in the process. There’s a researcher who calls these sort of events “errors of justice”. In other words, they are less clear. And there’s truth that these people who committed an offence should be punished by a prison sentence. How long they spend in jail should be part of that process. The idea of indefinite detention, that’s a no no. In international law, we shouldn’t do that.

Faith: With the pressure mounting for Alex Chalk the Secretary of State for Justice to act, how hopeful are you that there will finally be a breakthrough?

Hank: I am hopeful. There is action that people are taking and movement in the system. It’s a systemic problem, and what I know about systems theory is that you might have to take multiple approaches to shift a problem in a system. Unfortunately, when people say, well, how do you fix that? they say, well, you have to go through the legislative body and that’s our parliament. And parliament is a complicated place.

Alex Chalk is in the hot seat right now, and I know he’s really feeling it. There are things he could do tomorrow through LASPO (Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012) to make this go away using executive powers. He’s chosen not to use those at this point. We’ll see if there’s continuing pressure from campaigners and from international bodies. Maybe he will be pushed to do more. But the problem is that under international law, this must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Well, there’s 3000 people in prison to consider on a case-by-case basis. It’s a nightmare. So, we need some executive action. But I have a feeling that things will happen.

Following on from what Sam was saying, I agree this is the most egregious example of state violence I’ve come across in the UK in my lifetime. I’m over 50 years old. People have been persecuted in a way that I’ve never imagined in this country. The IPP sentence is toxic. It’s extraordinary that the system we have has not been able to rectify that. It leads me to believe that we have a very weak parliamentary democracy. Essentially the power of the executive to keep this going when it should not keep going, is too much. There’s something going wrong within the structure with the roles and the regulations of how parliament and our democracy work.

One thing that I’ve concluded is instrumental perhaps, and was talked about 15 years ago, was the merging of the role of the Lord Chancellor with the role of the Minister of Justice, When that job was boiled down into one, you end up with a problem of separation of powers, I think. And that’s a fundamental problem. So that’s something for us to think about in the future.

Faith: I had lunch recently with Shirley de’Bono where she shared with me her next step in her campaign for IPP prisoners being released, to go to the United Nations in Geneva to have discussions with Dr Alice Edwards, Special Rapporteur on torture. I believe you went along too.

Hank: I’ve been communicating and collaborating with quite a number of different people in different organisations, and I wasn’t expecting to be invited. In the week before a meeting was set up, I was invited to attend in Geneva with Dr. Alice Edwards and Shirley de’Bono and others, and the conversation was about what is going on and what might be done. Shirley presented several cases. I mean, just this is a horror show, isn’t it? You can’t make it up. I’m as worried about this as I have been about anything in my life. I lose sleep over this. And I think that this is an important moment. In Geneva more information was sought by the Special Rapporteur and indications were given that statements will be made in the future that perhaps will certainly shame the United Kingdom’s government on the international stage.

Faith: Do you think the UK government should take any notice of the United Nations, and if so, how much pressure should the United Nations place on the UK government?

Hank: The United Kingdom being a signatory to the Optional Protocol on the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) is a powerful thing. We’ve agreed to do certain things to honour certain international standards, and we’re not doing that. And the fact that this hasn’t been noticed for a decade is shocking. But going back to the torture problem, the United Nations has clear guidelines on this. We’re breaking many of them.

The United Nations doesn’t have legal or legislative making powers, but it has influence. On 30th of August the United Nations special rapporteur on torture made a statement condemning this situation. I believe they’ve sent a letter to our government and their response will have to have sent in before the 23rd of November, when we should hear what the letter said. We won’t know until then perhaps exactly what’s going on, but it’s all very useful in putting pressure on our government.

Faith: In your opinion, should the UK withdraw its signature from OPCAT because the very existence of an IPP sentence, which we know inflicts psychological harm, and psychological harm is a form of torture, does not align with its agreement to OPCAT?

Hank: I think we need to be part of this. And the whole point of mechanisms where someone can criticise you is useful. In some organisations you create a specific chain of responsibilities and it’s often known as “just culture” where whistleblowing is encouraged, and recriminations are not expected if someone highlights a concern. But in this system, we’ve have had the opposite, that the snuffing out of criticism and the silencing of objections has been part of why this has gone on so long. And that’s got to stop. The National Preventative Mechanism (NPM) has 21 agencies appointed by our government to fulfil the obligations under OPCAT. These agencies have certain powers and they’re not using them properly. Also, the independence of them is questionable. Is it time for a review of the NPM?

Three years ago, I introduced the idea of a people’s tribunal on indefinite detention to the Centre for Crime Justice Studies. We’ve weighed up whether there was any need for a tribunal process, if the Justice Committee made these very strong recommendations that change was needed, of course that’s very positive. But what we’ve found is that the government is not interested, and Parliament seems to have gone along with it. There are indications there’s going to be a bit of noise in Parliament about the Victims and Prisoners Bill. The international community are now waking up like a sleeping giant and the possibility of an independent process to hold government to account and to make a record of the situation is still an idea.

Using Disaster Incubation Theory, we can look at this crisis as an unfolding sequence of events, which was almost predictable. Baron Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice, made comments to Lord Blunkett before IPP legislation was enacted that this was a terrible idea. Blunkett claims not to remember the criticism of it, he went ahead and did it anyway. And look what happened. And you know, people have predicted this crisis.

However, one of the biggest problems of prediction is complexity and you can’t just keep people in prison because you think that something might happen in the future.

Faith: Initially an IPP sentence was to be imposed where a life sentence was inappropriate, so where did it go wrong?

Hank: Indefinite detention induces desperation; this is known from psychological research. Induced desperation is a form of psychological torture. There’s plenty of evidence to show that you don’t need more than a couple of weeks having desperation induced in you by this type of prison sentence to suffer mental health consequences. Suicidal ideation, depression, all of these things we hear about over and over again. It’s extraordinary that more people haven’t managed to take their own lives. So, imagine there’s a system which is inducing you to feel suicidal and then to sort of trap you in a suspended animation forever where you can’t kill yourself because they’ve taken away all of the facility for you to do that, but continue to indefinitely detain you. That is like a horror movie. We talk about the “psychological harms” of this, but it is absolutely punishing.

Faith: How has it got to this point where you’ve got so many people dying on a sentence? How has it been allowed?

Hank: It continues for political reasons. These are essentially political prisoners caught in a situation which is way beyond the norm and the political climate is such that it’s very difficult for someone to do something publicly about it. I suspect change may happen quietly in the near future, there will be moves to influence what happens at the parole board hearing, at the prison gate and what happens in various sorts of quiet corners of the system in order to expedite the release of these people while the international community waves its fist at us.

Faith: Bernadette’s story (Episode 6) highlights the ambiguous criteria for prisoners diagnosed with Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) and once on this pathway they are labelled. Why do you think this diagnosis is used against IPP prisoners rather than to help them?

Hank: This is an enormous abuse of power. What’s happened here is a shocking scandal. That’s why a tribunal process might be quite useful because since the invention of the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) twenty years ago they were constructing a diagnosis out of thin air for the purposes of managing people in a system, in this case processing them through a criminal justice system. The outcome of that is quite toxic, especially when we know that the incarceration of individuals has severe implications on their behaviour. The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) then implemented the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway (OPD) which might be seen again as a bogus system. It’s invented for management of people who are likely to be disruptive because of the nature of how human beings respond in a prison system.

Research by Robert Sapolsky on neuroendocrinology and research by Daniel Stokols, who is an environmental psychologist, suggests that people in prison systems are very likely to misbehave for many reasons if their circumstances result in a reduction of their agency. If you don’t have a strong identity or a strong sense of purpose, and you are subjected to many of the things that are happening currently in our prison system, you’re very likely to have people starting to suffer mental illness.

Sam: I think most IPP prisoners say I understand my original sentence and the original tariff. It’s what’s happened beyond there I can’t get to grips with and why I’m so distressed by it all. So, I don’t think it’s like shirking responsibility. They do say, okay, fine, I did what I did. Maybe I deserved custodial, but this is beyond what ever should happen to a human being.

Faith: As the OPD Pathway was originally designed for problematic prisoners, do you see any logic in 96% of all IPP’s are given this diagnosis?

Hank: It is cruelty beyond belief. Well, you’re going to be causing trouble if you feel you are being tortured, you’re going to become problematic.

Faith: With Bernadette’s partner, there seems to be little understanding or consideration of how he would struggle when medication for bipolar was withdrawn as a result of a new diagnosis of OPD. Do you see this as a cost-cutting exercise or something else more sinister? Where is the duty of care?

Sam: I think maybe they started with the intentions of cost cutting, this whole sort of merry go round of people being sent to psychiatric hospitals. They thought they could keep it inhouse and that they could label people with personality disorders and keep them inside these NHS units. But then what has happened is that it has become a tool to cage problematic prisoners which people on an IPP sentences will be just because of the nature of what’s happening to them. IPP related distress is not factored in with the OPD pathway, including at parole as we see.

I won’t use the word sinister, but it does feel like it was a way to preventively detain these people. By labelling them as having a personality disorder, or offender personality disorder, which we know is made up.

Faith: The provision of medication or the lack of medication should be a clinical decision and yet it is left to non-clinical staff to determine. Where do you think this failure originates and who is to blame?

Sam: I don’t know the answer to this question. I guess there’s a lot of bureaucracy that comes into this. I think it’s you who said to me that sometimes, prisoners move from prison to prison and their files don’t catch up with them. Then the prison staff don’t even know that they’re supposed to have medication at this time.

Hank: Clinical decisions should be made by doctors. The whole thing with, DSPD and the OPD where clinicians are left out, how can that make sense? Well, one of the reasons is there aren’t enough clinicians working in the system. This prison system creates mental health problems. It’s a double crisis.

Faith: Those in prison should get the same level of health care in prison.

Hank: Well, I have heard some anecdotal stories, some people have said that it’s hard to get mental health support outside prison, they have had better sort of conversations inside prison. It is hit and miss.

Someone who worked in a general hospital told me that the psychology services were downplaying people’s conditions because they knew they couldn’t provide resources to help them. Psychological assessments were being downgraded in the sense that if someone came in and they hadn’t actually tried to commit suicide, but were expressing suicidal thoughts, they were sent home because there was nothing that could be done. That’s extraordinary. That’s just out in the community. And we think the same things happen in prison.

Sam: I really don’t know where to lay the blame on this one. I think in some ways prison governors should have more discretion maybe to help how they deal with their prison.

Faith: In your pursuit of the truth about IPP it appears you have uncovered a further irregularity. In IPP Trapped podcast, Episode 6, Prof Graham Towl, previously Chief Psychologist at Ministry of Justice, says that Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) was invented not by psychologists but by politicians. This is an astounding revelation.

Sam: The DSPD, a precursor to the IPP, was brought in, in the late nineties. The DSPD and eventually IPP was a way to preventively detain people that they didn’t know what to do with whether that was correct in terms of criminal justice or not.

Faith: Is resentencing the only way to ensure that no one spends the rest of their life in prison despite having not been convicted of an offence of gravity that would warrant life imprisonment or is there some other way?

Hank: The government has re-sentenced people before. Resentencing is the thing that works for justice, but it might be slow, and it may not work well for the emergency that I see. I think this is like a mass casualty situation and it is a crisis with significant humanitarian costs, and it needs to be sorted out quickly. You can’t keep torturing people once you know that that’s what you’re doing. There’s a sort of denial going on amongst the authorities. Re-sentencing is a part of the story, but it might be that there are other things in the nearer term that might be needed to expedite certain people’s recovery. But yes, it’s definitely part of the network of considerations.

Faith: In practical terms how hard is it to change IPP? Must it be legislative change or a judicial change, or a policy and practice change? But in the case of legislation to that end takes time, given the prevalence of self-harm and suicides amongst IPP’s, some don’t have that time.

Sam: I think James Daly MP, often says these people could be in prison 40 years down the line. It sounds incredible, but. Yeah. If nothing is done, it could be 40 years.

Faith: I read that 75% of recalls to prison were IPP’s, yet 73% of these recalls didn’t involve a further offence. Do you think the criteria for recall is too broad?

Hank: Absolutely. This is all about risk aversion. For some reason, IPP’s have been put in this network of problems where risk aversion is of the highest order. Essentially the system assumes that they are the most dangerous people on Earth, and they really aren’t.

The parole board is getting it wrong; the probation service is getting it wrong, the judiciary got it wrong, and the government is getting it wrong. I can’t see any point in the system where they’re getting it right. That’s a frightening thing. We can keep talking about it and we can keep hoping that they will change because the more we talk about it, the less likely they’ll get away with it.

Sam: With recall, there’s the human element of probation officers where they just get things wrong, they are overzealous. One story I heard was someone who had moved address, he’d spoken to his probation officer, and he thought it was approved. A week later, the police collected him from his new address, saying that he breached his license, giving the reason as his change of address. But how did they know the address if the probation officer didn’t tell them? This strange logic that seems to be that the first principle is send them back to prison rather than keeping them in the community and finding the best ways that they can work with them.

Faith: With probation as with prison officers so many have left the profession and you’re left with those with very little experience. You are left with a system run by inexperienced people. So, mistakes will happen.

Hank: Along with the punitive ratchet, the problems in probation are the biggest thing that’s happened in the last 20 years. Everyone’s overloaded. And it’s just a system that’s in crisis again. From the moment you’re arrested for an offence, the police are in crisis, the courts are in crisis, the prisons are in crisis, and the probation service is in crisis. This does not bode well for a quick answer to this. I think this topic should be at the front of the queue for fixing and sorting. The discrimination that someone on an IPP is suffering from where a person who’s committed the same offence, who’s in the same cell or next door who’s getting out after a fixed term, that is discriminatory.

Sam: That’s why they talk about violent offenders when they’re talking about IPP and don’t look at the individual cases. Most cases between 2005 and 2008, were not serious crimes.

Hank: The whole thing is bewildering. I hear myself say “I can’t believe this is happening in our country”, especially a country that used to pride itself on having one of the better criminal justice systems. Other countries model their justice systems on the British system, and it turns out we’ve got the most rotten system around.

Faith: The criminal justice system is in such disarray, isn’t it?

Hank: Despite all the independent monitoring that goes on, it’s very hard to imagine that there’s not a lot more going unreported.

Faith: In your opinion is the current Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Rt. Hon Alex Chalk KC MP, going fast enough to resolve IPP in his tenure or will he too run out of road before the next General Election is called and purdah prevents any further progress being made.

Hank: I do think that Alex Chalk is listening and we’re getting messages that he’s thinking about what else to do. Then there’s this interaction with the United Nations. And we also know that there are news stories in the pipeline in the next few weeks. The weight of pressure for change on the system is as strong as it’s ever been. The campaigners who’ve done things have done amazing work. MPs are now better informed than perhaps they have been for some time. It is a window of opportunity. It may be that there’s judicial processes that haven’t been thought of because if the United Nations have stated that this is a particular problem, then perhaps there is a legal route that hasn’t been considered before because the United Nations hadn’t made a statement. But now that they have, now that the light is shining on the topic in a way that it hasn’t for a while, I think perhaps, you know, judicial processes might come to bear that haven’t been used before.

Sam: There is also the Victims and Prisoners bill. I’m not sure what happens if a general election comes along, but I think that’s what Sir Bob Neill is counting on if behind the scenes they’re not able to persuade Alex Chalk about re-sentencing.

Hank: It is a good idea. And there’s another amendment proposing an IPP advocacy role for supporting individuals at the parole board and in other ways. But both of those things are slow in coming into force. If there was legislation, it will still take a year. When you’re talking about a few years for anything to come of that, it isn’t very hopeful, is it? We want things to happen now. I think executive action is more likely to solve the problem in the shorter term. But yeah, I fully support everyone doing everything they can in the legislative process.

Thank you for reading to the end of the interview. The topic has engaged you and, hopefully, informed you. But what now – what will you do with what you now know?

There are several things you can do:

1). Write to your MP

Everyone can write to their MP about what you think about IPP sentencing. If you don’t know who your MP is, you can search via the ‘Find You MP’ via this link [ https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons ]. Simply put in your postcode and the page will give you their name and contact details.

2). Social media

If you use a social media platform you can share your thoughts about the IPP sentence. If you want some ideas, you can share a link to the ‘Trapped’ podcast series, or share a link to this blog interview. Or both.

3). Support a campaigning group

You can find a group which campaigns for change in the IPP sentence. There are several. Why not start with the one called UNGRIPP. Their website is www.ungripp.com They are on Facebook and on X, formerly Twitter.  

4). Above all, please don’t do nothing.