End the injustice of indefinite sentences – this scandal has lasted too long

Shabana Mahmood, the new justice secretary, has condemned the outgoing Conservative government for leaving the prison estate in a dangerous state. She was quite right to do so.

She says she has no choice but to take emergency action to release prisoners early in order to avoid “collapse”. She has our support in doing what is needed to rescue an unacceptable situation.

But she must also act to put right an inheritance not from the Conservatives, but from the last Labour government. There are still more than 2,700 people in prison who are serving indefinite sentences under legislation brought in by David Blunkett as home secretary in 2005. The law providing for Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) was repealed by the coalition government in 2012, but these prisoners continue to be held under its provisions.

Lord Blunkett, who has said the measure was the “biggest regret” of his time in government, told The Independent a week after the election that he hoped Ms Mahmood and James Timpson, the prisons minister, would end IPP detentions “at a very early stage in developing their priorities for action”.

So far, however, IPP prisoners have not been included in the early release scheme, on the grounds that there is no fixed term that can be reduced by a percentage. Nor have IPP detentions been included in the wider review of sentencing policy that the new government is undertaking.

This means that more than 2,700 prisoners continue to be trapped in legal limbo. They include Abdullahi Suleman, who was jailed for stealing a laptop 19 years ago and who still has no release date after he was recalled to prison for missing a hospital appointment.

As we report today, this is a terrible case of someone with mental health problems who should, as his wife says, receive “treatment rather than punishment”. Sir Bob Neill, the Conservative former chair of the justice committee of the House of Commons, said that Suleman’s case is a clear example of the “vicious circle” of the mental health deterioration endured by many IPP prisoners.

“That’s scandalous; that’s been done to him by the state, and the state has an obligation to sort this out because it continues to harm people,” he told The Independent.

IPP sentences were originally introduced for offenders who committed crimes that were not serious enough to warrant a life sentence, but who were considered to be potentially dangerous and who could be detained indefinitely until it was judged safe to release them. But they were used far more than originally intended, and in practice they were inconsistent and caused psychological harm to people imprisoned for relatively minor offences who did not know when or whether they would ever be released.

The original IPP sentences awarded a minimum term, known as a tariff, after which an offender could apply to the Parole Board each year for release, but only if they could prove they are no longer a danger to the public. This often required attendance on courses or treatment, which some offenders find difficult. Thus IPP prisoners often ended up serving much longer than those sentenced to fixed terms for similar offences. And there are still an unknown number of offenders out of prison on licence, living with the threat of being recalled on IPP conditions if they miss appointments or fail to complete rehabilitation programmes.

While Ms Mahmood and Lord Timpson deal with the more immediate problems of prison overcrowding, they must also put right a longer-lasting injustice, and transfer all IPP prisoners to fixed sentences or mental health plans. This scandal has gone on too long.