Our evidence to the Justice Committee Inquiry on the IPP sentence

With our friends at Justice Episteme, we submitted evidence to the Committee.

You can find it on the Committee's page here, or download it below.

In our evidence, we offered projections suggesting that, if nothing changed, there could still be some 2,000 prisoners serving IPPs by 2030, nearly two decades after the sentence was abolished.

We proposed a number of options for reform, including serious consideration being given to backdating the the 2012 abolition of the IPP sentence to all those serving IPP sentences, given that parliament itself accepted that the sentence was unjust.

As we wrote in our evidence:

The pragmatic case for abolition was secured by reference to the potentially exponential rise in prisoners subjected to a failing system...  less consideration seems to have been given to the fate of existing prisoners who had struggled under the restrictions. The logic of abolition was therefore compromised; the injustice of their treatment prior to abolition was never satisfactorily addressed. Had capital punishment been abolished in the same fashion, would the previously sentenced have been hanged nonetheless?