A few weeks ago our Director, Richard Garside sat down with NTD to discuss the IPP sentence.
It was a wide-ranging interview, covering the history of the sentence, who is affected by it now and what needs to be done to resolve it once and for all.
Discussing the injustice of the sentence, Richard a number of examples of prisoners still stuck in prison years after the period set by the court.
You’ve been sent to prison for two years. You’re still in prison seventeen years on. There’s something badly wrong about that.
Politicians, he argued, are ignoring the injustice of IPP in part because “the problem of two to three thousand prisoners (under the IPP sentence) is in the grander scheme things neither here or there”.
The interview also covered the wider challenge of criminal justice reform, including tackling sentence inflation, the massive increase in the number of prisoners recalled back to prison following release, how we could more or less abolish imprisonment for women, and what needs to be done to reform the youth justice system.
