A father who set himself alight as his mental health crumbled while serving 13 years in prison for stealing a phone is finally being transferred to hospital following a six-year battle by his family.
Thomas White, who is languishing under an abolished indefinite jail term described by the United Nations as “psychological torture”, developed paranoid schizophrenia and psychosis in prison as he lost hope of being freed from his Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
Last year, The Independent revealed how he had set himself on fire in his cell as this newspaper backed his family’s calls for him to be transferred for inpatient mental health treatment, after he was repeatedly refused a hospital bed.
In March, we revealed how he had he had suffered yet another mental health crisis, in which he repeatedly smashed his face on the floor of maximum-security HMP Manchester, where he was being held.
This week, the 42-year-old father of one learned he will finally be discharged from prison into hospital care.
His tearful sister Clara White told The Independent: “Thomas will now be a patient and not a prisoner.”
White will be moved from the Category A jail, where inspectors last year raised the alarm over widespread drug use, rising violence, poor living conditions and a string of self-inflicted deaths, to the specialist medium-secure Rothbury unit at Northgate Park in Northumberland.
“Thomas has been a casualty in this, but so have I and my mum and family,” Ms White said, after years watching him deteriorate inside jail. “He deserves to be treated with dignity, and I am just overwhelmed that he will go to a safe environment where he’s not being hurt.”
She said every member of the family shed tears of joy after learning the news on Monday evening.
“The hardest thing was watching my brother dying in front of me,” she added. “Every visit, he was just dying in front of me. He was weighing less and less. Look at his eyes, you could just tell the pain he was in.”
The move comes after prisons minister James Timpson personally visited White on the hospital wing of HMP Manchester during a visit in March, The Independent can reveal.
IPP sentences – under which offenders were given a minimum jail term but no maximum – were scrapped in 2012 following human rights concerns, but not retrospectively, leaving thousands of inmates trapped in jail for years beyond their original prison terms.
White, who had previous convictions for theft, was handed an IPP sentence with a two-year tariff for robbery just four months before the sentences were outlawed. Then aged 27, he had been binge-drinking when he took a phone from two Christian missionaries in Manchester.
Thanks to the indefinite jail term, he has remained incarcerated as his mental health has deteriorated. He moved prisons 12 times and was banned from seeing his only son, Kayden, who is nearly 16, for most of his prison term.
Three psychiatrists had called for White to be moved to a hospital to treat his mental health. The latest, on 13 February, concluded he was “struggling in the prison environment” and it was likely “he is deeply frustrated and angry as a result of his predicament”.
Two medical reports last year laid bare the toll of the devastating IPP jail term, warning that White’s “lengthy incarceration” was creating “impermeable barriers” to his recovery.
Dean Kingham, White’s lawyer, had argued it was “inhumane” to keep a man who needs hospital treatment incarcerated inside HMP Manchester.
Discussing the case earlier this year, he told The Independent: “The British Psychological Society has recognised the psychological harm caused by the IPP sentence. Here we have a man whose condition has deteriorated day by day, year by year, being held in a prison that’s failing, where the inspector in October 2024 issued an urgent notification – somewhere he can more easily access drugs than in the community. For me, here we have a potential Article 3 breach of his human rights.”
At least 94 IPP prisoners have taken their own lives in prison, according to campaigners.
Of 2,614 people still incarcerated on an IPP jail term, almost 700 have served at least 10 years longer than their original minimum term. However, successive governments have refused to re-sentence IPP prisoners, despite calls from the justice committee and the UN special rapporteur on torture following high rates of suicide and self-harm.
