Most open-ended sentences in Europe

There are 5,059 prisoners serving an open ended sentence for public protection (IPP). They appear on the Prison Service computer as serving 99 years, scary. The average tariff specified by the court when they were sentenced is 2.97 years. There are still more going in every day, and since 2005 when the sentence was introduced only 47 have been released. Nearly 1,500 are beyond their tariff date, some by many months and more than 500 by more than a year.

These people are in a place called limbo, between heaven and hell. They have no clear date or indication when they are likely to be released.

In addition, the number of men and women serving life has just peaked at 7,031 (according to a Parliamentary answer of 25 February to Dr Rudi Vis MP).

Incredibly, there are just over 12,000 men and women serving open ended prison sentences in England and Wales

This means that in England and Wales we now have locked up in our prisons more people serving open-ended sentences than all 46 other countries in the Council of Europe added together, and that list includes Russia and Turkey and Germany and Ukraine.

There are about 100 people a month being sent to prison on the IPP.

It used to be that the prisons were clogged up with short sentence prisoners, and whilst this is still a serious problem, the catastrophe facing the prisons is sentence inflation, with thousands of men and women being sent to prison with no realistic prospect of release.

The government has been caught by its own legislation – it had no idea that so many people would be sucked into this sentencing morass. Now they don’t know what to do. They announced that there would be a minimum of two years tariff to try and head off the short sentences, why after all give an open-ended sentence to someone the courts thought really only deserved six weeks? But that has not had any effect. The torrent continues.

The government has passed to the Parole Board the job of deciding whether each individual prisoner may be released once the tariff set by the court has expired. But the Parole Board is woefully under-resourced to deal with the sheer numbers and terrified of being bullied by ministers. I was at the Parole Board meeting when John Reid berated them for not caring about victims and then stomped out of the room, like a cross child. The fact that everyone, yes everyone, in the room had been a victim of crime, and some of them very serious crimes, had not occurred to that simple-minded home secretary. Now he is benefitting financially from private companies that lock people up (see previous posting).