We Live In This Handcuffed Fear

Sian Bradley writes:

Nearly 160 miles from home in Manchester, Clara White lay awake. She could not shake the sight of her brother, Thomas, crying during her visit to the psychiatric hospital in Northumberland where he is being held.

“I can see in the way he looks, the way he sits, that there’s absolutely nothing left in him to give,” she said. “He’s prepared to die in there.”

In 2012, Thomas White was arrested for stealing a mobile phone from two Christian missionaries while he was heavily intoxicated. His family say the exchange was non-violent and involved no weapons, though it was legally classified as a street robbery because the item was taken directly from the victims. He received an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence, a two-year tariff with no maximum term.

Fourteen years and four months later, he still has no release date. White, now 43, was moved to hospital nine months ago after a political intervention. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and an independent psychiatrist concluded the IPP sentence was the probable cause of his illness.

Clara White says that IPP prisoners like her brother are trapped. They need to complete a rehabilitation course to be eligible for release, but they are deprioritised in favour of people who have a specific release date. Transferred across 14 prisons in 14 years, Thomas White was never given the chance to complete a “progressive programme” that can have waiting lists of up to four years.

Andy Burnham has called for a review of IPP sentences as part of efforts to tackle the prison overcrowding crisis. Introduced in 2003, IPP sentences were intended as a preventative measure to protect the public from “dangerous” offenders whose crimes did not legally merit life sentences, but who still posed a significant future risk to society. IPPs were abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively.

James Daly, then the Conservative MP for Bury North, told the House of Commons in 2023: “If Thomas had been sentenced four months later, he would not be in prison now.”

Lord Clarke of Nottingham, the former home secretary, told Times Radio on Sunday that he “never imagined” that 14 years after abolishing IPPs, 2,329 people would remain “indefinitely detained, perhaps until the day they die, some of them having served far longer than the maximum sentence for the crime they actually committed”, costing taxpayers nearly £120 million a year.

In 2016, Thomas White, held at HMP Norwich, began speaking in Roman numerals on calls home. He was seen walking the wing wrapped in a bedsheet, “presenting himself as Jesus Christ” and promising to heal people.

After he was repeatedly sent to solitary segregation while experiencing psychosis, “something died inside of him”, Clara White said. “If he rings now, I think, ‘Oh, there’s my brother’ for three or four minutes, then he meets you with a Bible scripture at every conversation.

“You’ve got to remember that he was a normal person. It’s the system that’s done this to him. It’s love that’s going to get my brother well, not negligence in these institutions.”

Growing up in poverty in Moss Side, Thomas White began shoplifting and stealing bikes, from the age of 12 and, from 2004, had a record of 16 previous convictions for theft and robberies that legally triggered the “dangerousness” clause under IPP.

“What Thomas did was wrong,” Clara said, but insisted he had “served his time”, adding: “If he would have committed that same crime three months after the abolishment, he would have done two years, he would have been out.”

Thomas White was held at HMP Strangeways until last year. Reports reached his family that he was jumping on wing safety netting, trying to break his legs through cell bars, smashing his face against the floor and trying to set fire to himself.

During a visit with her MP, James Frith, Clara White was outraged to find out that her brother was being kept among the general prison population, and told staff: “If my brother dies at the hands of your prison, I promise you won’t forget his case.”

He was transferred to a secure hospital after interventions by Lord Blunkett, the former home secretary, and Lord Timpson, then the prisons minister, yet he now faces being sent back to prison as hospital staff claim he is “not engaging” with therapy.

Thomas White told his sister he felt “like a Rubik’s Cube where they’re just turning and turning” and that he was never getting out, whether or not he talked to support workers.

Although she welcomed Burnham’s review of IPP, Clara White struggles to feel optimistic. “In the face of an injustice so painful, the words begin to lose meaning. When you’ve got hope and you’re dropped again, it’s a long drop to the ground. One of mine and my mum’s darkest fears is: will he make it out?”

According to official data, 96 IPP prisoners have killed themselves in custody. “To live is a race in IPP,” Clara White said. “Not everybody is going to cross that finish line.”

Clara White was ordained as a priest last year, to work with Church on the Street to continue her social and criminal justice campaigning. She was raised in the Christian faith by her grandmother, a former Irish Magdalene sister, and religious belief keeps her going. “Justice goes beyond stained-glass windows. My faith tells me where there is injustice, you bring justice,” she said.

Yet fighting for her brother has taken a personal toll: “We live in this handcuffed fear. They owe him his bloody life, and I want his life back.”

Demanding that Burnham intervene to move her brother to a community hospital near Manchester, she said “prison ministers are small fish now in an ocean. You have to go straight to the top, to the organ grinder.”

The Ministry of Justice said: “It is right that these sentences were abolished, and as the IPP annual report shows, support has significantly improved for these offenders, with greater access to rehabilitation and mental health support. We are now looking at what more can be done.”

The ministry added that resentencing IPP prisoners to determinate terms would give automatic release dates to offenders assessed as dangerous by the Parole Board, noting that 488 recalled prisoners were released over 12 months.

And Simon Hattenstone writes:

In January 2015, Tommy Nicol told his family that he was suffering “psychological torture of a person who is doing 99 years”. Nicol had been given an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence six years earlier for stealing a car from a garage and injuring the owner. He was already two years beyond his four-year tariff – the minimum time you can serve in prison before being considered for release. Nicol was given another two-year knock-back from the Parole Board and was in despair. If and when he got released, he would be on a lifelong licence. Eight months later, aged 37, Nicol hanged himself at The Mount prison in Hertfordshire, England.

By the time he took his own life, the inhumane IPP sentence had already been abolished for three years. The problem is, it didn’t apply retroactively. Those already serving IPP sentences stayed on them. This, despite David Blunkett, who devised and introduced them as home secretary in 2005, calling it “the biggest regret” of his political career. And this despite UN special rapporteur on torture Alice Edwards agreeing with Tommy Nicol that the sentence was “psychological torture”. Astonishingly, more than 2,000 people are still serving IPP sentences in England and Wales.

Last week prime minister Andy Burnham announced a new review into indeterminate sentences as part of his plan to reduce the prison population. Reviewing a sentence that was abolished 14 years ago seems Kafkaesque. And what exactly is left to review? We all know IPPs are wrong – they are no longer handed down, and those serving them should be resentenced. Review after review has said so. Surely it makes more sense to simply introduce legislation to make that happen?

IPPs were given to people who didn’t merit life sentences, but were regarded as a risk to society. With an IPP, once prisoners have served their tariff, they have to apply to the Parole Board for release. The Parole Board only grants release if satisfied that the offender no longer poses a risk to the public. This means that an IPP prisoner could be detained indefinitely. It was expected that very few prisoners would receive IPPs (an estimated 900 at any one time) and only for serious crimes.

The reality couldn’t have been more different. Between 2005 and 2013 (a handful of people were sentenced after the cut-off of 31 December 2012), 8,711 people were given an IPP sentence. While some had long tariffs, most were on low tariffs for minor crimes. Nevertheless, many never got released. Or if they did, they were recalled to prison for the slightest breaches of their licence, such as being late for appointments with probation officers.

Often the people who were imprisoned on an IPP were already vulnerable. Not surprisingly, many prisoners lost hope, like Nicol did. Ninety-four people had taken their own lives up to March 2025 while serving the sentence in prison. Forty-four people are known to have taken their own lives while out on licence, though these community-based figures have only been tracked since April 2019, so are likely to be higher.

The IPP horror stories are legion, and many concern young people such as Martin Myers, who served 18 years for attempting to steal a cigarette, despite having an original tariff of just 19 months and 27 days when sentenced aged 24; Ronnie Sinclair served 16 years in jail on a three-year IPP tariff for stealing a flowerpot at the age of 17; and Wayne Bell was 17 when he was imprisoned on an IPP for punching a boy and stealing a bike in 2007 on a tariff of one year and 350 days. He is still in prison 19 years later.

Although the lifelong licence was removed for IPP prisoners in 2024, many are still serving the sentence. As of June 2026, there were 2,271 IPP prisoners jailed in England and Wales – 856 unreleased prisoners and 1,415 recalled prisoners.

This proposed review would be the third since 2022 when the cross-party Justice Committee Inquiry concluded IPP sentences were “irredeemably flawed” and recommended resentencing. Nothing was done. Last year the Howard League expert working group recommended fixed-release windows for IPP prisoners. Nothing was done. A private member’s bill sponsored by (Lord) Anthony Woodley urged a comprehensive, retrospective resentencing exercise for all prisoners still subject to an IPP. The bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords and progressed to the committee stage, but the government blocked it.

The campaign group Ungripp fears that any new review will have the same outcome as previous ones. “Each review meant more wasted time, more people on IPP despairing and inevitably, more suicides,” it says. “How can we be confident this will be any different?”

Shockingly, all but three of the 2,271 people serving IPP sentences in prison are past their tariff. With resentencing, these three prisoners would be given a fitting determinate sentence, while the 2,268 remaining IPP prisoners would gradually be released with appropriate social care and housing to ensure they were safe within the community and the community safe with them. The £60,000 a year saved in prison costs would go a considerable way towards paying for this.

So why hasn’t it yet been done? Simple. Political leaders are terrified of looking soft on crime – so they have consistently kicked the IPP can down the road. Yet IPP sentences are universally recognised as unjust. Not a single mainstream politician defends this barbaric sentence.

Last year Keir Starmer said: “It is right that the IPP sentence has been abolished”, but he wasn’t brave enough to resentence IPP prisoners. Andy Burnham must be braver.

The former supreme court justice Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood called IPP “the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system” in a 2020 report for the Prison Reform Trust. If Burnham wants to show he means business, he will not bother with another review and will simply legislate to get this shaming stain removed once and for all.

Resentencing is too late for Tommy Nicol and the many others IPP prisoners who took their own lives, but it’s not too late for those still behind bars, tortured by not knowing whether their imprisonment will ever end.