Kafka could indeed have invented the indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP), but it is even more iniquitous than described in your article (Defunct law that keeps thousands in jail is branded absurd by Clarke, 31 May).
Not only are men, women and children spending years past the tariff imposed by the judge, but once released they are on licence for life. Last year 363 people were returned to prison after having served years in jail, only to serve more years to go through the whole parole process yet again.
Last week I met the family of a prisoner who had been given a tariff of one year. After 13 years, he is still in prison. When he is released, probably in another couple of years, he will be on life licence and subject to recall at any time. Only after another 10 years could he apply to have the licence lifted. As yet no one has done this, so we don’t know if it will ever be granted.
We have mass incarceration in this country, not quite on the US scale, but not so very far off. We have to learn from the Americans, who are addressing mass incarceration by cutting back on excessively long prison sentences. The IPP has been abolished, but is still with us – and will be for decades unless we not only get people released from prison but deal with the licence period imposed by legislation designed by Franz Kafka.
Frances Crook
Chief executive, The Howard League for Penal Reform
• The Guardian, the BBC, the Prison Reform Trust and Ken Clarke have performed an invaluable service in again exposing the injustice and inhumanity still being visited on the thousands of prisoners in England and Wales who have served the “punishment” period of their sentences, but are still being indefinitely punished for crimes they can’t prove they won’t commit in the future if released – a form of punitive, indefinite preventive detention surely unprecedented in a democracy in peacetime. Ken Clarke as justice secretary abolished indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPPs) in 2012. Figures on the Ministry of Justice website are either hopelessly out of date, or fail to distinguish between IPPs and (quite different) life sentences, or both, but the BBC says there are still about 4,000 with little hope of ever being released, and that nearly 400 have served more than five times the period for punishment in their sentences. The simple solution proposed by Ken Clarke before he was spinelessly sacked by David Cameron is to abandon the Kafkaesque condition for release that the IPP prisoner must satisfy the parole board that he or she will not reoffend (an inherently impossible requirement), and substitute a parole board obligation to order release at the end of the punishment period unless it has specific, published reasons for believing that the prisoner will constitute a serious threat to the public if released.
If enough MPs receive messages from constituents calling on parliament to make this simple and uncontroversial change forthwith, there’s an outside chance that a sickening injustice will at long last be ended. (Labour’s apparent silence on the issue is incomprehensible.)
Brian Barder
London
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