Yesterday, May Day 2012, was a very special day for a little noticed reason. On 1 May 2012 an Act of Parliament abolished the infamous system of IPPs (Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection). This régime, the brainchild of Labour’s David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary, has kept – and still keeps – literally thousands of men and women in prison cells long after they have served the portion of their sentences deemed by the judges to be sufficient for their punishment. They remain incarcerated indefinitely. The only way they can regain their freedom is by satisfying a risk-averse parole board that something has happened to them while in prison which demonstrates that they will not reoffend if and when they are released. Predictably, this requirement to prove a future negative has set IPP prisoners an almost impossible task, and only a tiny percentage (around 4%) of IPP prisoners have ever been released, even though in many cases their original offences have been relatively minor – as their often short minimum sentences have shown.
The Act of Parliament which has at long last swept away future IPPs, the Legal Aid, Sentencing & Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, or “LASPO”, deals with a wide range of topics in addition to the abolition of IPPs. Many of its provisions are controversial, and some are certainly objectionable. It seems clear that some of the more draconian provisions of the Act have been included as the price that Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, and the government’s house liberal, has been forced to pay for the abolition of IPPs, a measure that goes against the grain of much Tory backbench opinion and the reactionary policies of the feral tabloids. The Labour frontbench, much to its discredit, has dismally failed to give even lukewarm support to Clarke’s efforts to rid us of IPPs: indeed, there have been moments when shadow ministers have come close to opposing abolition, whether from fear of the tabloids or because of pressure on them from the succession of illiberal Labour home secretaries responsible not only for IPPs but also for numerous other indefensible laws on crime and punishment and under cover of the so-called war on terror. So the abolition of IPPs owes nothing whatever to the Labour opposition in Parliament or to the massed ranks of retired colonels on the Tory back-benches.
However, it’s too soon to say ‘Mission Accomplished’. Thankfully, no more IPP sentences can now be passed. But all those handed down before 1 May 2012 remain in force, and those thousands of prisoners who have paid their debt to society, but still see no hope of ever being released, still face the same impossible requirements for regaining their freedom as if LASPO had not been passed into law. The gleam of hope for them lies in the power given by LASPO to the Justice Secretary to set new criteria to be used by the parole boards in deciding whether an IPP prisoner can safely be released. It’s clear from earlier Justice Ministry documents that the intention will be to remove the onus for demonstrating that the prisoner will not reoffend from the prisoner, requiring instead that the parole boards must order the prisoner’s release unless there are solid and specific grounds for believing that he will reoffend if released. This change can’t happen too soon if a huge weight of fear and uncertainty is to be lifted, not only from the prisoners concerned, but also from their families and other loved ones. Now is the moment, not only to liberalise the criteria for releasing IPP prisoners, but also greatly to accelerate the processing of all those who have served their minimum sentences (‘tariffs’) but who still languish in jail under what can only be described as preventive detention.
Ken Clarke and his Justice Ministry deserve congratulations and thanks for steadfastly sticking to their guns and getting this significant reform through Parliament and onto the statute book, in the face of widespread timorous doubts and much outright hostility, some of it from powerful quarters. They need no reminding that the task is not completed until the last post-tariff IPP prisoner walks through the prison gates to freedom.
As a postscript, this blog is glad to have played a part, however small, in the campaign for the abolition of IPPs, including the provision of a space on the Web in which literally hundreds of relatives of IPP prisoners have been able to appeal for advice and support, as well as expressing their anguish and fear at the appalling uncertainty facing them and their loved ones, never able to be sure that the person concerned will ever be released. Many have written in comments on blog posts here about the disgraceful games of cat and mouse played with IPP prisoners by parole boards and the prison authorities in the effort to postpone indefinitely a decision on whether a prisoner has demonstrated that he will not reoffend if released. This cruel behaviour by an effectively unaccountable authority should now be ended by an entirely new regime, to be installed by the Ministry of Justice, to ensure that the great majority of IPP prisoners are systematically, but rapidly, processed and released without further delay.
Historians of penal reform by a right-of-centre government, sulkily opposed by a supposedly left-of-centre opposition, may care to read through some of the posts on this blog over the past several years, including especially the hundreds of comments appended to them by others: http://www.barder.com/3419, /3372, /3355, /3350, /3331, /3326, http://www.barder.com/politics/liberty/ipps-extracts-from-parliamentary-papers-october-2011, and many, many more.
So: three cheers for May Day, 2012 and the end of IPPs. By all means open the bubbly! But tomorrow there’s more work to be done before those infamous IPPs can be said to have been consigned to where they belong: the dustbin of history.
Brian
The Labour leadership has made a regrettable mistake in seeking to put the problem of antisocial behaviour at the top of the party’s list of priorities, however large it might and does loom in the lives of its many victims.
In the first place, the problem is inherently insoluble, so any measures proposed as Labour policy are doomed to be seen as failures, even if some of them achieve occasional partial success.
Secondly, this is preeminently a problem to be tackled in local communities, not by a novelty silver bullet (‘restorative justice’) fired by swingeing legislation from the centre. To mix the metaphor, one size will never fit all.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, putting top emphasis on antisocial behaviour is fatally reminiscent of the Blair years, giving the impression that Labour is more concerned to sound tough than to promote progressive reform, uphold civil liberties and defend human rights. It should increasingly obviously be an urgent priority for the Labour leadership to mark a sharp break with New Labour: to make the fresh start promised by Ed Miliband in his speech at the party conference immediately after the leadership election.
On far too many subjects Labour under Mr Miliband sounds like a continuation of Blairism. Some of the old stagers of the Blair and Brown governments need to be pensioned off, or at any rate invited to keep quiet: above all, not to complain if some of the more glaring deficiencies, errors and indeed crimes of the Blair years are now explicitly disowned by the party he led. For evidence of this pressing need, you only need to look at Bradford West. Whatever people might think of George Galloway as a politician and a person, thousands of us have been yearning to hear our Labour leaders talking pretty much the same language as Gorgeous George – so far, in vain.
There’s also the question of priorities. When we have the most reactionary government in living memory systematically dismantling the welfare state; enriching the bankers at the expense of the unemployed, the homeless and the disabled; squandering millions on pointless and unwinnable foreign wars; maintaining an ‘independent British nuclear deterrent’ which is not independent, which is not British, and which deters no one; selling off the NHS to private interests; privatising state education and removing it from local authority control; tackling an economy in depression through lack of aggregate demand by slashing the disposable incomes of working people and throwing millions of public servants out of work, thus throttling such demand as still survives – when a Tory-led government is doing all these appalling things, it beggars the imagination that a Labour leader and Leader of the Opposition can be seriously proposing that the main focus of the party’s national policy should be antisocial behaviour.
I’m not saying that antosocial behaviour doesn’t matter: obviously it is the bane of very many people’s lives. But so are aeroplane noise, inefficient public transport, travelling conditions in the rush hour, bullying and sadistic bosses, interminable road works, customer service call centres, criminally over-priced restaurants and petrol pumps, rotten standards of nursing in hospitals and Mr Nick Clegg. National politics can do something about some, but not all, of these familiar pestilences. None of them, though, not even antisocial behaviour, qualifies for the top billing in the national policies of a great political party, at a time when our whole liberal democracy is under active threat (not to mention such issues as climate change and global poverty). Right now the worst and most damaging kind of antisocial behaviour is that of Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg. First things first, please, Mr Miliband.
[This is an edited and expanded version of a comment on an article about Labour policy on antisocial behaviour in LabourList, here.]
Brian
The European Court of Human Rights is preventing Britain from deporting the radical Moslem preacher, Abu Qatada, to his native Jordan on the grounds that he would not get a fair trial there if, as is likely, much of the evidence against him would have been obtained by torture. Instead of joining the clamour for the public to be protected by ever more draconian and illiberal measures from the threat posed by this pantomime villain, Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, would be better advised to attack the coalition government from a liberal and enlightened position, perhaps using the following script:
“The Home Secretary, Theresa May, and her illiberal right-wing supporters in this House, should be ashamed of themselves for their reckless and populist attacks, not only on the European Court of Human Rights for preventing the government from deporting Abu Qatada to be tried in Jordan and probably convicted there on evidence likely to be tainted by torture, but also for attacking our own judge, the chairman of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), who has rightly ordered that Abu Qatada should be released on bail, subject to extremely stringent conditions, since he clearly cannot and should not be kept indefinitely behind bars any longer when apparently — and inexplicably — our police and prosecuting authorities can’t find any evidence on which to charge and try him, and under the ruling of the European Court, there’s no prospect that we shall be able to deport him any time soon.
“It is a sad reflection on British justice that we have kept this man in prison in England for a total of 8-1/2 years — the equivalent of a 17 year prison sentence — without having charged him with any offence, still less having put him on trial. Half a dozen countries around the world reckon that they have enough evidence to put him on trial, if they can get their hands on him. Apparently we are the only one that can’t. One of our oldest and most jealously guarded liberties is the right not to be deprived of our liberty except after a fair trial by our peers. How can the Home Secretary demand that this individual, however evil he might be, should be kept in prison even longer when we aren’t prepared to charge or try him, and we can’t legally deport him? Does Mrs May want to sentence him to another eight or nine years behind bars when he is entitled to the presumption of innocence until a court of law convicts him of an offence? If we can’t put him on trial and we can’t deport him, he is absolutely entitled to his liberty. Once he is free, he can be subjected to intense surveillance by the police and the security services, so that the moment he steps out of line the evidence will be there for him to be tried, convicted and given an appropriate sentence, not by a government minister, not by the bellowing colonels on the back benches opposite, and not by the tabloids, but by an impartial judge.
“The Home Secretary says ‘it is simply not acceptable that Britain cannot deport a radical Moslem cleric who poses a serious risk to our national security.’ Does Mrs May not understand the basis on which the European court has ruled that to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan where he is unlikely to get a fair trial would be a breach of his fundamental human rights, as defined in the European Declaration of Human Rights to which this country has subscribed, in accordance with the ruling of a European court whose jurisdiction we have accepted? Does the Home Secretary, of all government ministers, not subscribe to the rule of law? If she can’t grasp the importance of respecting the legal rights of everyone in this country, however vile they might be, perhaps she should have a talk with her colleague, the attorney general, who understands these things so much better. (I hope I won’t get him into trouble by saying that.)
“The government says it is considering the possibility of an appeal against the decision of the European court, presumably welcoming the likelihood of further humiliation. It is also continuing to pursue the possibility of deporting Abu Qatada to Jordan. I suppose they hope to extract from the Jordanian government a document that will say: ‘Normally we do like to torture a few witnesses in terrorism cases to make sure they will give the evidence we want, but since you have asked us to make sure that we don’t use torture to convict Abu Qatada, we will do what we can to comply, although we aren’t sure that we have total control of our prosecutors, who do seem to have potentially controversial ways of making people talk. We have deliberately qualified this promise a little, because we are not really that keen to have this man back in Jordan: we would much sooner he was kept in Britain for another decade or so. After all, he’s your problem, not ours.’
“The Home Secretary and some of the retired colonels on the benches behind her have lost no time in seeking to exploit the case of Abu Qatada in support of their campaign against the European court of human rights, a body which Britain took a leading part in establishing and whose decisions we are bound to respect and obey as a treaty obligation under international law. The Prime Minister is taking the lead in accusing the court of interfering in the rights of national governments and parliaments to make their own policies and carry them out. Sir Nicolas Bratza, the distinguished British judge, appointed by Britain to represent us on the European court and currently the president of the court, has taken the unusual step of publicly reprimanding our Prime Minister for misrepresenting what the court does and for failing to understand its history and role. Yet again the Prime Minister brings Britain into disrepute. Predictably, the right-wing tabloids and other chauvinistic voices have set up a clamour about the ruling of the European court and the decision of our own British SIAC that Abu Qatada must be released on bail. Do the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary do their duty by defending the role and decisions of the judges against ignorant, prejudiced criticism, and pledge to act in accordance with the law, however unpalatable its requirements might be? On the contrary: they join in the clamour, ensuring by their example that it becomes yet more subversive of the rule of law, more disrespectful of Britain’s international and domestic obligations, more shrill.
“Those of us who served in the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are justifiably proud of their many achievements. But as Ed Miliband said in his speech to the Labour Party conference immediately after his election as party leader, Labour’s attitude in office too often seemed casual about British liberties. Too often we sponsored legislation to enable us to imprison without trial people who had not been convicted of any offence, but who were thought likely to commit an offence if they were left at liberty. People given Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) are still behind bars in punitive conditions after having served the punishment part of their sentences, sometimes years ago. They go on being punished, no longer for what they have done, but for crimes that someone thinks they might possibly commit if they are let out of jail. Other people have been placed under control orders which make it impossible for them to lead ordinary lives, earn their living and socialise with their friends, deprived of most of their liberty without ever having been charged or convicted of breaking the law. The present government, to its credit, has abolished control orders, but it has replaced them by something very similar – T-PIMs, control orders lite. The Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, also to his credit, is taking steps to abolish IPPs — but introducing new mandatory prison sentences which eat into the discretion of the judges. Now the Home Secretary and her supporters are damning the Special Immigration Appeals Commission for ordering the release of Abu Qatada on bail conditions similar to those imposed by the old control orders, not because these are too severe but because they think Abu Qatada should not be let out at all but should be kept in prison indefinitely, even if this would be against the law.
“When the coalition government was formed, we were promised that its junior partners, the Liberal Democrats, would be able to restrain the authoritarian and illiberal tendencies which are the traditional mark of the Conservative Party. Yet the voice of the LibDem members of the coalition is silent while the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary flout and vilify every principle of a civilised society which respects the rule of law. I have to confess that until now what should be the liberal voice of the historic values of the Labour Party on the opposition front bench on our fundamental human rights and liberties has also been either muffled or silent. I now pledge that this will change. We should no longer have to rely on the government’s two token small-l liberals, the Secretary of State for Justice and the Attorney General, to uphold our traditional British values. We claim to be a law-abiding people. It’s time we had a law-abiding government.”
Come on, Yvette: you can do it!
Brian
A government Bill, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill (‘LASPO’), now going through parliament aims to replace the infamous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection or IPPs, a legacy of Mr Blunkett’s tenancy of the home office, with ‘tougher’ determinate sentences for various very serious offences. Replacement of IPPs won’t, however, be retrospective. Nearly 7,000 IPP prisoners are currently adding to the grotesque overcrowding in our jails, and more than half of them have served out their tariffs and ought, in justice, to be released unless in a few exceptional cases it can be demonstrated that they represent a genuinely serious risk to the public if set free. The LASPO Bill makes no direct provision for these. But we now have a valuable statement of the position from an authoritative source.
The following letter from a senior official at the National Offender Management Service, stating the government’s policy on existing IPP prisoners following the ‘reform’ (or replacement, or abolition) of IPPs under the LASPO Bill currently going through parliament, is important, cautious but generally encouraging. [Hat-tip: Mr Robinson of Emmersons Solicitors and the Facebook IPP Campaign website]:
Dear Mr Robinson
Thank you for your e-mail of 22 January about the indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP).
You ask what is happening to speed up the release of post tariff IPP prisoners and what will be done to ensure post tariff IPP prisoners are treated fairly when the IPP sentence is reformed by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill (LASPO) Bill. On 26 October the Government tabled amendments to the LASPO Bill which will reform sentencing for dangerous offenders. We will replace IPPs with a tough new regime which will see more dangerous criminals given life sentences, and others spending long periods in prison and being supervised for long periods after their release. Prisoners currently serving an IPP sentence will not be released unless the Parole Board authorises it.
However, there is concern that those currently serving IPP sentences should be supported in progressing through their sentence and reducing their risk. We will be using our best efforts to improve the progression of these prisoners through sentence, including improvements to assessment, sentence planning and delivery, and parole review processes. We continue to monitor outcomes to ensure further improvements in this area.
In the Sentencing and Rehabilitation Green Paper last year we raised the issue of whether the Parole Board’s test for release in these cases was the right one, and this is a question that we will explore further. Our legislative proposals also give the Secretary of State a power to change the release test used by the Parole Board for IPP prisoners and prisoners serving the new extended sentence. We plan to consult on whether the current release test for IPPs and the new Extended Determinate Sentence ensures effective public protection while allowing offenders to demonstrate that they can be safely managed in the community.
Yours sincerely,
Polly Churcher
ISP Policy Lead
Public Protection Operational Policy Team
NOMS Offender Management & Public Protection Group
Ground Floor, Grenadier House 99-105 Horseferry Road London SW1P 2DD
For multiple statements and examples of the giant miscarriage of justice represented by IPPs, please do a search for ‘IPPs’ on this blog, including for the most recent (here). Thanks to an enlightened Justice Secretary, it looks at last as if IPPs are on the way out, whatever misgivings we might have about some of the measures proposed to replace them. It’s good to know from Ms Churcher’s letter that if and when IPPs are replaced, the fate of those serving IPPs when LASPO bec omes law won’t be forgotten. It would be a gross denial of justice if any significant number of IPPs were to be left languishing in prison well beyond their tariffs, their release delayed by mainly bureaucratic factors. Polly, we look to you to make sure that not only justice is done to these people, but also that justice is done briskly and humanely.
Brian
Unless one is a fanatical Scot, it’s impossible to read the whole torrent of comments on the new-found Scottish Question, so selection is unavoidable. Actually, it’s only necessary to read one blog post and two articles from the UK press of recent days: Neal Ascherson in the Observer of 15 January, and Simon Jenkins in the Guardian of the 12th. An Observer sub-editor has tried to put readers off Ascherson’s article by giving it a misleading headline (confusing ‘sovereignty’ with ‘devo max’), but the article itself, as usual with Professor Ascherson, is spot on. Some 70% of Scots, according to the polls, want devo max, and their elected First Minister is apparently prepared to offer it as an option in the referendum. All signs are that with devo max on the ballot paper, the independence option would be defeated. So what do the leaders of all three main UK unionist parties say? That devo max should not be offered as an option in the referendum, which should be confined to two options, independence or the status quo, neither of which the majority of Scottish people appear to want. No one has been able to put forward a single argument for denying to Scotland a constitutional development which a clear majority of Scots do want, which would be capable of changing the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK for the better while leaving the Union intact, and which might well save the UK from disintegration. Truly, those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Wake up, Mr E. Miliband!
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According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, a group of right-wing Tory grandees are planning to derail the cuts in legal aid provision proposed by the Justice Minister, Ken Clarke, in his Legal Aid, Sentencing And Punishment of Offenders Bill currently going through the House of Lords. If the Lords vote to delete the cuts, there is likely to be a battle royal between the Lords and Commons when the Bill returns to the Commons, where the government will presumably seek to restore them. Fortunately or otherwise, the same Bill provides for the abolition (euphemistically described as the ‘replacement’) of the scandalous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, or IPPs, under which nearly 7,000 men and women are crowding our jails in preventive detention, despite having in most cases completed their punishment for the offences they have committed. Those who care about justice must hope that abolition of IPPs will not fall victim to a battle between the two Houses over legal aid, which has nothing to do with indeterminate sentences: these are an ugly blot on our justice system and Mr Clarke, the coalition’s house liberal, is absolutely right to want to get rid of them.
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It may be some time before we know why the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia hit the rocks in one of the biggest ever disasters in the world of cruising. Nor do we know yet why the evacuation of the ship seems to have been so chaotic, although some survivors are already being quoted as claiming that there had been no boat drill since the start of the cruise several hours earlier. Costa executives, currently no doubt unusually busy, can be forgiven for not yet having removed from the Costa website the page devoted to the joys of cruising on Concordia:
It’s here, on this futuristic and exclusive ship, that the fun, relaxation and excitement of a special holiday take shape. Imposing and majestic, Costa Concordia is one of the biggest ships in the Costa fleet, a real floating temple of fun that will amaze you. Wellness, sport, entertainment and culture: a thousand different experiences on a unique holiday await you on board Costa Concordia.
Excitement indeed, and ‘a thousand different experiences’! And, as the Costa website also promises:
Costa sails always with you: Stay connected from wherever to start your holiday right now! Immerse yourself in the world of Costa Cruises …
According to Wikipedia, Costa Cruises is part of the predominantly American Carnival group, which comprises eleven individual cruise line brands (including Cunard and P&O Cruises), operating a combined fleet of over 100 ships with a total of over 190,000 cabin berths. Carnival Corporation and Carnival UK control operations in North America and the UK, while Costa Cruises Group, based in Italy, control operations in the rest of Europe. The latter is responsible for operation of Costa Cruises in Italy, AIDA Cruises in Germany and Ibero Cruises in Spain. AIDA was previously a subsidiary of P&O Princes Cruises PLC, being transferred to Costa following the merger of Carnival Corporation and P&O Princess in 2002. Ibero Cruises is a new brand, created in 2007 as a joint venture between Carnival Corporation and Orizonia Group. Tracking down the ultimate responsibility for what happened to Costa Concordia will be no simple matter.
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Returning to Scotland for a moment, lovers of the natural beauty of the Lanarkshire landscape are appalled by the threat to one of its most outstanding and historic beauty spots posed by an imminent application for planning permission to undertake opencast sand and gravel quarrying on a vast scale in the immediate vicinity of the Falls of Clyde. This is officially designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, yet the Lanarkshire and Scottish planning and preservation authorities mostly seem to have been persuaded (how?) that there is no need to object to the quarrying application. Luckily a professor at nearby Glasgow University (and an old friend), Mark Stephens, has set up a campaign, Save Our Landscapes, to try to save the Falls of Clyde and the surrounding area from ruin. As another distinguished economist has pointed out in a letter to The Scotsman, there is plenty of sand and gravel all over (or under) Scotland, and no need to pick on an area of special natural beauty to dig it out. Please have a look at the Save Our Landscapes Facebook page, and if you’re convinced by it, write a letter to The Scotsman or the Glasgow Herald, or to your MSP (if you live and vote in Scotland), or to South Lanarkshire Council, or to Scottish National Heritage (“We are the Government funded body that looks after all of Scotland’s nature and landscapes across all of Scotland for everyone“), urging that the quarry company, Cemex, be told to look elsewhere for their sand and gravel.
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As a consequence of trouble with ageing, arthritic fingers plus outstanding filial generosity, most of this web post has been produced by dictation to a program of voice recognition software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, absolving me from almost any need to hammer away at a keyboard. Initially sceptical about the possibility of any software reproducing my dictation without the need for me to spend as long correcting it as it would have taken to type it in the first place, I have been dazzled by the eerie accuracy with which this disembodied secretary reproduces virtually every word I say, down to the last name and comma. You have to ‘train’ the thing to get used to your tone of voice, accent, vocabulary and normal volume, by reading some prose to it and giving it some documents that you have written for it to scan and commit to memory. Once you have done this, it seems to know what you’re going to say even before you have said it. However quickly you type, Dragon will reproduce your dictation at 10 times the speed. No, I don’t have shares in the company that produces Dragon, so I feel free to recommend it to those whose typing is substandard or whose eyesight is beginning to fail, condition all too common in my age group. Just speak up!
Brian
An editorial in today’s Guardian and an accompanying column by Simon Jenkins state with admirable vigour the unanswerable case against the vicious system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs). Both should be compulsory reading for anyone who cares about justice, or who has any lingering doubts about the affront to fundamental principle represented by IPPs. Both Guardian pieces rightly lambast the Labour leadership of Ed Miliband (unfortunately confused with his brother in Jenkins’s column, a typo that must have Simon chewing the carpet this morning) and Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, who happens to be my MP and a friend, for their cowardly failure to come out loud and clear against IPPs. Presumably they are still intimidated by the instigators of IPPs, David Blunkett and Jack Straw, who don’t want their dismal ministerial records disowned — unless it’s the synthetic wrath of the Sun and Daily Mail newspapers that is frightening them into their lamentable defence of the indefensible.
Some of the comments on the Guardian editorial (“Sentencing: Bloodlust for life”) on the paper’s ‘Comment is Free’ website make sad reading, reflecting the fog of ignorance and prejudice that surrounds the whole issue of IPPs. In reply to one of these, by no means the worst, I have added my own two-penn’orth of support for IPP abolition:
It’s sad to read the pedantic criticisms by the anonymous ‘syncretist’ of this powerful and cogent editorial, which makes an unanswerable case for abolishing IPPs. The ‘presumption of liberty’ is a pithy way of stating the principle that a person who has completed his punishment is entitled to be released unless there’s an overwhelming likelihood that he’ll be a danger to society if he is, whereas under the perverse logic of IPPs the onus is on the prisoner to prove that he won’t reoffend — an impossible requirement, as the editorial rightly points out.
‘Kafkaesque’ is an apt word for the dilemma described — where the IPP prisoner can’t convince the parole board that it’s safe to release him until he has taken a specified course, eg in anger management, but when he applies for a place on the course, he is turned down because he isn’t assessed as sufficiently dangerous to warrant a place on it! Kafkaesque indeed — and Helleresque too, as you say (a classic case of Catch 22). Also Alice in Wonderland. It accurately describes the nightmarish predicament that IPP prisoners who have paid their debt to society and completed the punishment imposed by the court are still likely to face — effectively a life sentence for an offence that no-one could possibly think deserves imprisonment for the rest of a person’s life.
Not a single penal reform organisation and not a single authority with experience of penal affairs, from former Inspectors of Prisons to the Chair of the Prison Governors Association, or from Liberty to the Prison Reform Trust, supports the retention of IPPs. Their continued use is an affront to justice and Labour’s opposition to their abolition is indeed shameful (and I write as a lifelong Labour supporter). Well said, Guardian (and also Simon Jenkins on the preceding page).
Brian Barder
IPPs are unjustifiably wrecking the lives of tens of thousands of people — nearly 7,000 IPP prisoners who have no way of knowing whether they will ever be released, and their families, partners and friends who dread the real possibility that they will never see their loved ones return to their homes again. The system will be abolished if Parliament passes the relevant clauses of Ken Clarke’s reform Bill now going through its various stages. Unfortunately the same Bill includes much more questionable provisions as well, including indefensible limits on legal aid and backward-looking proposals for new mandatory sentences for the most serious offences, in addition to those for murder. Swallowing the latter may be the price that has to be paid for getting rid of IPPs, which must be the top priority. If you care about justice and want to see the righting of a great wrong, please use every means open to you — blogging, Tweeting, Facebook, writing to your MP or a national newspaper — to urge everyone to read the two forceful pieces in today’s Guardian, and to use whatever influence you might have with the Labour Parliamentary leadership to shame it into supporting the abolition of IPPs, now at last in sight.
PS: For more detail of the monstrous defects of IPPs, please see earlier posts on this website here, here, here, here and here — including the comments on them and links in them to yet more articles on the subject. And having read all that, have a very happy Christmas.
Brian
The Labour leadership is making a sad mistake in opposing the government’s decision to abolish IPPs (Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection), as I argued in a new blog post yesterday. The other sentencing changes announced last night by the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, and adequately summarised on the Guardian’s website here, also deserve general support by all small-l liberals, despite justified misgivings over the expansion of offences that are to attract mandatory life sentences. It would make a welcome change if the Labour front bench were to respond to the reform programme as a whole on the following lines, which I commend to the shadow Justice Secretary, the Rt Hon Sadiq Khan (also my MP):
“The most important of the new measures announced by the Justice Secretary is the welcome decision to replace Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) by tough fixed-term sentences for the most serious offences. This should help significantly to reduce the excessively large prison population, of which more than 6,000 are currently serving IPPs, over 3,500 of them having already served their tariffs (the part of their sentences set for punishment). I welcome Ken Clarke’s assurance that only some 20 of those 6,000 IPPs would have qualified for the new mandatory life sentences for very serious sexual and violent crimes. Labour has serious reservations about introducing mandatory life sentences for crimes other than murder, as the government now proposes: we think judges, not politicians, should decide each sentence in the light of the circumstances of each case; but Ken Clarke has promised that ‘Judges would retain the discretion not to impose a mandatory sentence if it would be unjust to do so’, which should preserve reasonable flexibility. Mandatory life sentences will apply only to cases where an offender has twice been convicted of a serious offence attracting a sentence of at least 10 years on each occasion, so in practice the addition to the prison population resulting from this measure should be small.
“We especially welcome the proposal for a four-month mandatory prison sentence for aggravated knife possession for 16 and 17-year-olds, but not for younger children. Those convicted of ‘using a knife or offensive weapon to threaten and endanger’ are to be given a four-month detention and training order, two months in a young offenders institution and the rest undergoing training in the community. Adults will receive an automatic six-month sentence for the same offence. This should help to meet widespread concern about the menace of knife crime.
“Our concern until now that if IPPs are abolished, prisoners will be released while still a threat to our security, is adequately allayed by the promise of longer sentences for the most serious offences, allowing more time for reform and rehabilitation, and by the decision that serious offenders will not become eligible to apply for release on licence or parole until they have served two-thirds of their sentences, instead of the current half-way mark.
“It is a sorry indictment of the coalition government that these generally positive reforms have been so long delayed by widely reported opposition to them within the Cabinet and no doubt also from the unregenerate ranks of reactionary Tory back benchers. If the Liberal Democrats in the coalition, with their claims to be the champions of liberal reform, have been supporting the Justice Secretary against his right-wing critics in the long drawn-out argument over these reforms, we have yet to hear of it. It is not only over Europe that both the Conservative party and the government are split from top to bottom, with their Lib Dem allies standing helplessly on the touchline.”
Unfortunately, however, I have little confidence that Ed Miliband or Sadiq Khan will take anything like such a positive line in response to Ken Clarke’s reform programme. Labour is apparently still trapped in the retrograde, pathologically risk-averse mind-set of successive New Labour home secretaries on the subject of prisons, crime and punishment. It’s time to return to Labour’s liberal reformist roots. How bizarre that it’s a Tory Secretary of State for Justice who is blazing the trail!
Update (pm 27 Oct 11): The Justice Secretary was quoted on the Daily Politics programme today as having said he would be consulting about the idea of making it easier for Parole Boards to “let out” those serving the Indeterminate Sentences that he’s getting rid of. You can hear the relevant words here, beginning at 18’50″. This is the first reference I have seen or heard in the interviews and media coverage since Mr Clarke’s proposals were published last night to their implications for existing IPP prisoners. It’s encouraging, as far as it goes. But it will be controversial.
Brian
At last the prime minister himself has signalled the firm intention “shortly” to end the cruel injustice of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs).
David Hanson, Labour MP for Delyn, who was a minister of state for Justice in the Labour government, asked a question in today’s Prime Minister’s Questions demanding that the prime minister drop the Justice Secretary’s proposal to abolish “Labour’s” IPPS, on the grounds that they were necessary to keep dangerous criminals off the street. David Cameron replied that there would shortly be an announcement by the Justice Secretary. IPPs were a failed system which didn’t work and was not widely understood. They would be replaced by tough determinate sentences which would keep dangerous criminals off the street; and the government would end the current system whereby dangerous criminals were being released half-way through their sentences. This would be generally welcomed. (You can hear the question and answer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016lrw2/Prime_Ministers_Questions_26_10_2011/
– beginning at 21’36″.)
This seems to be the firmest commitment so far, given by the prime minister himself, to the ending of IPPs, and it must be irreversible. There are other signs that the announcement by the MoJ is imminent. I have commented on the Emmersons Solicitors IPP campaign Facebook page –
Let’s hope that the determinate sentences which are to replace IPPs won’t be mandatory, unduly savage, or applied to any but the most serious violent offences. But if IPPs are really to go, that will be a huge gain. I doubt if the MoJ announcement will deal with the question of existing IPPs, but it will be very surprising if there’s no action soon to simplify and speed up the procedures for dealing with post-tariff IPPs even if there’s no public announcement about it.
Tragically, the terms of the question to the prime minister by David Hanson (presumably inspired by the Labour leadership) and of the latest statement by the Labour shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, appear to commit Labour pretty firmly to oppose the ending of IPPs. This refusal, or inability, to acknowledge the injustice of IPPs, the misery they inflict on thousands of people who have either committed no offence or else have been punished for what they have done and paid their debt to society, the indefensible imposition of what amount to life sentences for offences for which a life sentence is manifestly and grotesquely excessive, and the disastrous practical effects of keeping thousands of IPP prisoners indefinitely in already over-crowded prisons, marks the definitive end of any hope of Labour abandoning the crudely illiberal attitude to penal policy reflected in the records of successive New Labour home secretaries.
In his first speech as Labour leader, Ed Miliband promised to change the Labour government’s often casual attitude to civil liberties. That promise is now being spectacularly broken. Labour MPs who obey their leaders’ instructions to vote against the ending of IPPs will bear a heavy responsibility. How comfortable can they be with the company they will be keeping when they join forces with the most primitive of the hangers and floggers on the far right of the Conservative party in parliament and the country, and the most ignorant and unscrupulously populist of the tabloids and the reactionary broadsheets? What a betrayal of the core principles of a once progressive and compassionate Labour party!
Let’s hope that the LibDems in parliament will steadfastly support this long overdue reform; that there’ll be enough enlightened Labour rebels against their own front bench to ensure that the government’s proposals will be approved by parliament; and that IPPs will soon be history.
Brian
Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, has again attacked Ken Clarke’s humane, courageous and progressive programme of penal reforms designed to reduce our bloated prison population, improve prison conditions by enabling prisoners to work and undergo rehabilitation training, provide treatment instead of punishment to victims of drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness, and expand non-custodial community sentences which are demonstrably more effective in deterring re-offending than imprisonment, as well as saving public money. Clarke plans to abandon Labour’s deplorable plans for building yet more prison cells and to replace the indefensible system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) which leaves thousands of people indefinitely behind bars in preventive detention long after they have paid their debt to society. Sadiq grudgingly accepts some of these objectives but repeatedly accuses Clarke of being motivated purely by a desire to save money and of seeking to undermine the Labour government’s achievements.
His latest attack on Clarke and his reform programme appeared in Huffington Post Politics on 6 October. Despairing of achieving anything by discreet private lobbying and argument, I finally went public with an exasperated comment on the Huffington website:
This is a seriously disappointing article. Kenneth Clarke, the only established liberal Tory in the Cabinet, proposes reforms in penal policy that are urgently necessary, mostly to repair damage done by successive New Labour home secretaries, and which include sharply reducing prisoners’ numbers at a time when (as every penal reform expert agrees) up to half of the prison population shouldn’t be there; giving work to those who genuinely need to be imprisoned; and replacing the monstrous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs). Sadiq Khan, an excellent constituency MP, opposes or carps at all these proposals. He misrepresents Clarke’s figure (3,000) for reducing the prison population as a target when it’s clearly an estimate, and attacks Clarke’s proposed abandonment of the mindless New Labour plan to build yet more prisons. Sadiq denounces cuts in police numbers when he must know there’s no correlation between front line police numbers and crime levels. He denounces Clarke’s acceptance of cuts in his departmental budget when he knows that such cuts would be unavoidable under any government, and many of them could be achieved by progressive reforms.
At a time when Ken Clarke’s ministerial future is in jeopardy because of his public exposure of Theresa May’s dishonest demand for repeal of the Human Rights Act, Labour should be defending him and his liberal reform proposals against the assaults of reactionary Tory MPs and tabloids. If Clarke goes, all hope of progressive penal reform goes with him. Please think again, Sadiq!
Progressive and humane penal reform policies were once a central element in Labour’s core values. A series of reactionary and illiberal New Labour home secretaries abandoned those principles, over-reacting to terrorism and tabloid demands for ever harsher punishments for offenders with a string of authoritarian measures that filled our prisons to bursting point, allowed re-offending to soar, and laid the foundations for authoritarian behaviour by the police and the security authorities, criminalising protest and introducing an indefensible (but little recognised) system of preventive detention that’s unprecedented in peacetime in the modern era. Much of the present Justice Secretary’s reform programme is designed to repair some of this damage. Sadiq Khan said, without a trace of irony, in his speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September this year:
I believe we should all worry that this Coalition Government threatens to undermine our hard work.
In his speech to the previous year’s Conference on 28 September 2010, immediately after his election to the Labour leadership, Ed Miliband famously promised to change the party’s direction, not only on Iraq but also on civil liberties and human rights:
[W]e must always remember that British liberties were hard fought and hard won over hundreds of years. We should always take the greatest care in protecting them. And too often we seemed casual about them. Like the idea of locking someone away for 90 days – nearly three months in prison – without charging them with a crime. Or the broad use of anti-terrorism measures for purposes for which they were not intended. They just undermined the important things we did like CCTV and DNA testing [sic]. Protecting the public involves protecting all their freedoms. I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty. I want our party to reclaim that tradition. …when Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high re-offending rates, I’m not going to say he’s soft on crime…
When is Ed Miliband going to remind his shadow Justice team of that seminal promise, which indeed Sadiq might well have drafted? You will search Sadiq Khan’s Conference speech last month, and his Huffington Post article, in vain for any evidence that he remembers it. Instead, in his own 2011 Conference speech, Sadiq saw fit to reopen the controversy over Clarke’s remarks about rape:
Remember his insensitive and offensive comments on rape? On Radio 5Live, and in response to the statement “rape is rape, with respect?” He said, and I quote: “No, it’s not”. Mr Clarke, let me tell you rape is rape.
Ken Clarke’s ‘offence’ had been, you’ll remember, to point out the obvious truth that while all rapes are serious crimes, some are self-evidently more serious than others, a fact recognised in the wide variations in rape sentences as well as by common sense. Either Sadiq doesn’t understand that, which seems unlikely in an experienced lawyer and former Chair of Liberty: or he does, in which case….
By their unremitting and undiscriminating attacks on an enlightened and humane Tory Justice Secretary, the Labour front bench have made it easier for the prime minister to surrender to the cave-dwellers on the Tory back benches, to an unprincipled and populist home secretary, to the hangers-and-floggers in the country and their favourite tabloids, by sacking Clake from his job. If the LibDems, both in and out of the coalition government, had been brave enough to make support for Clarke and his reform proposals a condition for continuing LibDem membership of the coalition, and if the Labour opposition had similarly been brave enough to honour Ed Miliband’s promise when he was elected leader, they would have hugely improved the chances of Ken Clarke surviving the current reactionary campaign against him and thus enhanced the chances of success for his reforms. How sad and how ironical that in this major conflict, the shadow Justice Secretary has consistently positioned Labour well to the right of a Conservative minister and thus helped to jeopardise all hope of penal reform for a generation!
Full disclosure: Sadiq Khan is my MP, and one whom I both like and respect. He’s an excellent, conscientious and hard-working constituency MP. He has been patient with my stream of appeals and complaints and generous with his time in listening to them. He knows, as I do, that my despair at the party leadership’s failure to abandon New Labour’s illiberal policies on law and order and civil liberties is widely shared in the Labour party’s grass roots. As Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign manager and adviser, he will certainly not have forgotten that inspiring promise in Ed’s first speech as leader. It’s hard to dismiss the suspicion that some of those who lumbered the party with such a dismal record on civil rights and liberty, the Straws and Blunketts and others, continue to exercise a baneful influence on the Labour front bench, mainly in a misguided attempt to defend their own records in office. If so, it’s surely well beyond time for them to exercise restraint instead of influence. Mr Miliband might usefully indicate to them that their time is past and that, in an echo of Attlee’s famous words to the then party Chairman, Harold Laski, a period of silence on their part would be welcome.
Brian
More than enough has been written from all parts of the political spectrum about the underlying causes of the recent riots, looting and arson all over England. Most of those causes are too obvious to need re-stating. It’s equally important to consider the likely consequences of these events and how, if at all, they might be limited. The worst of the consequences must be the probable demise of the proposals of the enlightened Conservative Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, for sharply reducing the bloated size of our prison population, concentrating on the rehabilitation and humanising of those prisoners who genuinely need to be there, and thus reducing current appallingly high rates of re-offending. A key part of this programme, the replacement of the indefensible system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection or IPPs, for which this blog and hundreds of contributors to it have persistently campaigned, is unlikely to win public support in the current atmosphere of savage (and largely justified) animosity against the thieves, muggers and arsonists who briefly gained control of our streets only a few days ago. In the current climate of fear and vindictiveness among our political classes, anything remotely associated with liberalisation of our medieval prison and penal policies will be howled down and torn to pieces by the slavering hounds of punitive reaction. Ken Clarke must be one of the most disappointed and saddest men in politics. The abandonment of what remains of his reform programme, now probably inevitable, ranks among the most tragic casualties of these dreadful events.
A more general consequence will be the huge cost of financial and other support for those who have lost their livelihoods, been made homeless, or been injured, by the indiscriminate violence and the looting and torching of shops, businesses and homes. Huge insurance pay-outs will lead to overall increases in premiums, which will necessarily be passed on eventually in higher prices for everyone. Inescapable government expenditure on sustaining the homeless and those whose jobs have been destroyed, as well as contributing to the cost of re-building gutted premises, will inevitably add to the budget deficit, paid for ultimately from increased taxation or, more likely, yet more cuts in other social services. The level of household demand in the economy, already so low that it’s paralysing the country’s recovery from recession, will be further reduced by the loss of people’s livelihoods and resulting destruction of their spending power. The off-setting stimulus provided by rebuilding activity and the jobs it will create will be temporary and short-lived, as the Japanese experience after the floods and tsunami has demonstrated. On the plus side, the manifest need for generous government support of the victims of the looting and destruction may help to discredit once again the neo-liberal lie that central government expenditure is the problem, not the solution. The further stimulus to the recovery of demand and return to growth in the economy that only fresh medium- and long-term government spending can provide might even gain general support, now that ministers are forced to acknowledge the government’s responsibility for helping the victims of the riots. Even our pig-headed Chancellor will be hard put to it to avoid some bumping up of public expenditure in these saddest of circumstances.
Analysis of the underlying causes of the riots in the left-of-centre media has been generally predictable. What many commentators have described as the root causes of the class conflict (I use the term advisedly) that we have been witnessing in this past week are mostly so obvious as hardly to be worth stating. It’s hard to restrain one’s anger with a governing class that has ruled us for the last three decades largely in the interests of the rich and privileged, imposing on us an economic and financial system based on a self-interested, intellectually disreputable, discredited and indefensible ideology, recklessly dismantling, step by step, the unifying social contract, evolved during the second world war and the first few decades after it, which during all that time was almost universally accepted at all levels of society as palpably fair. It was Mrs Thatcher, with her simple-minded dogmas and petty provincial values, who began the work of destruction – to the despair not only of Labour and Liberal progressives but also of committed Conservatives like Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Lord Carrington and Harold Macmillan.
After the Thatcher-Major years, the Blair-Brown government had notable achievements to its credit in rescuing large parts of the welfare state and social services from the depredations and neglect of its Tory predecessors, but in other areas it continued Thatcherite policies of neoliberalism, further dismantling almost all democratic restraints on the financial and business sectors, ignoring the growing mountain of private debt, continuing to privatise essential public utilities, relying increasingly for government revenue on the grotesque profits of the financial sector at the expense of declining industry, and explicitly indifferent to the resulting increase in gross inequality in society and the social consequences that have increasingly flowed from it. A succession of reactionary New Labour and Tory home secretaries have exploited international terrorism in order to justify more and more draconian measures of repression designed to keep the lid on the inevitable anger and frustration of a larger and larger under-class, augmented by immigration, degraded by the breakdown of the family and of enlightened education and by unscrupulous profit-driven tabloids, and ruthlessly exploited by a greedy and unprincipled private sector indifferent to the public interest and focused exclusively on short-term shareholder value. The international banking failure and resulting global recession have given our current political masters a further pretext for winding down what remain of our social services, making the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens pay the price of the greed and antisocial antics of the investment bankers and businessmen. The justified sense of injustice has been sharply aggravated by the recent evidence of the continuing antisocial greed of the bankers and other rich tax-dodgers, the scandal of MPs’ expenses, the revelation of industrial-scale law-breaking by the media and the collusive bribery of the police.
I’m not suggesting that every thief or thug out on our streets on recent nights has been acting in protest or even in knowledge of these scandals: only that the discrediting of such a broad swath of the ruling classes has created a palpable atmosphere in which even once respected members of society have been shown to be shamelessly grabbing what they can for themselves, inevitably prompting the question: if they can do it, why can’t I? Now the riots, looting and arson of the last few days are providing yet another pretext for still more repressive measures against the victims of the crude class warfare which has been shamelessly waged against them throughout the time in which most of them have been alive.
Yesterday I spent some hours listening appalled to the debate on the riots in the house of commons, specially recalled for the purpose from its holidays on the Mediterranean beaches and in the North American mountains. Tory after Tory, including David Cameron with reckless clarity, declared that poverty, unemployment, the abolition or curtailment of even basic welfare payments, rotten and inadequate housing and schools, the lack of hope or opportunity, or any of the other desperate deprivations that we, the rich, have visited on our fellow-citizens, couldn’t “excuse” the criminality that we have been experiencing on our streets. It shouldn’t need saying that absolutely no-one, not even the most rabid letter-writer to the Guardian, has suggested for a moment that these grim conditions “excuse” crime. Deliberately confusing the definition of contributory causes with ‘excuses’ is a cheap and discreditable trick. But those who see only criminality in what has been happening, and who can’t imagine doing anything about it beyond increased savagery in sentencing and punishment, should have no place in public life. Unfortunately that applies to a sizeable number of those who govern us, on both sides of the political fence.
Rioting and criminality by some members of an oppressed and neglected under-class are nothing new. I was living and working in New York at the time of the riots that followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both justly regarded as champions and eloquent voices for the dispossessed (it’s still legitimate to ask oneself cui bono? who benefited from silencing them?). I remember the great satirist Mort Sahl remarking with brutal irony at that time on the spectacle of thousands of poor Americans expressing their grief and anger over the murders of their champions by breaking into stores and stealing refrigerators. Again and again in continent after continent resentment against authority manifests itself in attacks on the nearest available target, usually the police. It doesn’t require any expertise in Keynesian theory to recognise rank injustice and grotesque inequality in a consumer society and a celebrity culture where people experience acute poverty in the midst of blatant and extravagant luxury enjoyed, often, by those who have seemingly done nothing to earn it. As every parent and teacher knows, one of the first moral judgements pronounced by small children is invariably “That’s not fair.” There comes a point when those who know that their treatment by society is not fair but who feel helpless to do anything about it feel justified — wrongly according to the social code by which we have to live — in taking the only action open to them to gain some control of their own lives. That’s inexcusable; but then so is the condition to which we have reduced our society. Many of those who took to the streets last week will end up in an over-crowded prison, abandoned in their cells for perhaps 22 hours a day, depersonalised and in many cases criminalised for life by the experience. The ‘remedy’, being essentially irrelevant, will be worse than the disease — not only for the teen-age looters and arsonists, but for all of us.
Update, 2300hrs 12 Aug 2011: Those who, like me, are disturbed by the sentence of six months’ imprisonment passed on 23-year-old Nicholas Robinson, an electrical engineering student, for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from a branch of Lidl in Brixton, are urged to read a sober and scrupulous analysis of the sentence in MTPT’s blog, here (hat-tip: Tony Hatfield on Facebook). The only possible conclusion from this analysis is that the sentence was a travesty of justice and that it ought to be immediately reduced on appeal to a community service order asnd curfew. It will be worrying if the atmosphere of fear and vindictiveness generated by the riots is allowed to result in excessively harsh sentences being passed on those who in many cases don’t deserve the sympathy that such injustice will evoke. The same applies to whole families now being evicted from their council flats or houses on the basis that one family member has been charged — but not yet even convicted — of participation in looting or other riot-associated offences. This reeks of both collective punishment and blatant disregard of the principle of entitlement to the presumption of innocence until convicted in a court of law. We are seeing evidence of fear and panic on the part of our governing class: not a pretty sight.
Brian
