Less blaming and more protecting
The imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence was introduced in England and Wales by the Labour government in 2005 and abolished by the Coalition in 2012. It enabled the courts to impose an open-ended jail term on convicted criminals for whom a life sentence was considered inappropriate but who none the less posed a continuing risk to the public. The rationale was to stop potentially dangerous prisoners being released automatically halfway through their terms, as happens now with most inmates. It meant that, in the absence of a determinate sentence, the parole board had to judge when it was safe for the convict to be freed.
As a result, many prisoners who would normally have been released under the normal sentencing rules were kept in for far longer. The system became clogged up with IPP inmates seeking reviews and the courts eventually ruled that without proper review procedures the sentences were unlawful. One of those jailed under this regime was Usman Khan, the terrorist who killed two people in London on Friday. In 2012, he was handed a sentence with no fixed end date; but the same year, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act scrapped IPPS and reintroduced the role of the parole board for extended sentences of 10 years or more.
The Appeal Court ruled that Khan’s indeterminate sentence should be substituted for an extended sentence with automatic release at the halfway point. For all these reasons, a man rightly considered by the trial judge to be so dangerous that he should not be released without great care being taken was allowed back on to the streets to kill. We are now witnessing the unedifying spectacle of party leaders trying to pin the blame on to their opponents, when they are all culpable to some extent. It is fatuous to say this matter should not be turned into an election issue. If the security of the nation is not to be discussed in an election, what is the point of holding one?
This case raises a host of issues about sentencing that our politicians need to address. Voters cannot comprehend why a man known to be dangerous was released automatically without even a cursory risk assessment being undertaken. There are 74 terrorists in the same position as Khan and while some are to be recalled to jail for breach of their licence conditions, the sound of stable doors being slammed shut far too late is deafening.