IPP Sentences to End 'Once and for All', Commons Told
Justice Secretary Alex Norris pledged legislation to end IPP sentences “once and for all” by the end of this Parliament, with a cross-party group overseeing how releases are handled — 2,271 people remain on the abolished sentences, 856 never released, and 96 have taken their own lives. Male prison spaces have fallen to around 1,500. The shadow justice secretary called it a “fag packet policy” — “the Government’s fifth early release policy in just six weeks”.
A former Lord Chief Justice supplied the sentence history will keep: IPP prisoners were punished “grossly excessively” under “preventative detention… absolutely contrary to the principles of justice” — and Parliament, which created the sentence in 2003 and abolished it prospectively in 2012, has finally been told the remainder will be unwound. The cross-party oversight group is the mechanism’s cleverest feature, spreading ownership of every release decision that later goes wrong. Mr Timothy’s “fifth policy in six weeks” count is fair as arithmetic and hollow as critique; churn is what repairing a collapsing system looks like from outside. Fifteen hundred spare cells is the number beneath everything. Watch the bill’s release test when drafted — and October’s first tranche meeting reality.