'IPP is a type of sentence, not a type of person'

The IPP sentence is a type of life sentence which was used by English and Welsh courts between 2005 and 2012 and was given to 8,711 people. On its surface, the IPP sentence was designed to protect the public by removing the automatic release of those who had committed two or more serious offences – meaning prisoners could be imprisoned beyond the tariff handed down by the courts.

IPP sentences were hugely controversial for many reasons; they were applicable to 153 different crimes, including criminal damage and affray which, before the introduction of IPP, would only have led to a short prison sentence. An IPP sentence means there is no guarantee that prisoners, even those serving short tariffs, will ever be released if the Parole Board still deems them a risk to the public, and those who are released remain on licence for the remainder of their lives.

Those sentenced to IPP may also be recalled to prison if they breach their licence and may then remain in custody indefinitely until the Parole Board deems them no longer a risk. At the end of March 2024 there were 1,180 prisoners serving IPP who had not yet been released and 1,616 people who had previously been sentenced to IPP who had been recalled to prison – all but 13 of them had passed their tariff date.

'We almost thought that IPP was quite good'

Sophie Ellis' current role at the Prison Reform Trust involves conducting and commissioning research to support campaigning and advocacy as well as writing the Bromley Briefing – an annual prisons digest. However, Sophie began her career training to be a Forensic Psychologist but left the profession due to moral and ethical concerns over IPP.

She began working in the prison service in 2008 and worked with many men who were serving IPP sentences. 'IPP fits psychologists' values quite well on the face of it. It's the ultimate expression of personalised punishment. The theory is everyone is an individual with an individual set of risk factors, and let's not release them until they've addressed those risk factors. I think in the early days, we almost thought that IPP was quite good – it gave us more flexibility, or so we thought, to work with people and to do it in a more individualised way.'

However, Sophie soon began to see the impact of IPP including prisoners not being released after serving their tariff, not being able to access programmes that would help them demonstrate they were no longer a risk to the Parole Board, or people having gone through programmes and still being deemed a danger. 'I had a gradual, dawning awareness that these people were stuck in prison, and what we were doing wasn't helping them.'

The tipping point for Sophie arrived after writing a risk assessment for a man on an IPP sentence who was several years over tariff where she commented that the role of justice should be considered in progressing IPP cases. 'I got that report back from my supervisor with that whole paragraph highlighted with a single comment line saying, "we're not here to comment on justice". And I thought, no, I'm the sort of person that really cares about justice actually. That's when I started deciding whether to stay in or get out.

'The IPP sentence was a large part of why I left prison service. I was ethically opposed to the sentence, I didn't want to be part of administering it anymore, it felt like you were hitting people again and again with a hammer without offering a meaningful way out of it that they could engage with.

'I think I have a lot of survivor's guilt. I know individuals who are really trying to do what they can about IPP from the inside. We need everybody, we need people on both sides of the gate trying to advocate. But for me personally I couldn't sit with that feeling of being complicit.'

Nic Bowes, who runs one of the Forensic Psychology doctoral training programmes at Cardiff Metropolitan University and works in practice on the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway in Wales, said she still encountered people serving IPP sentences and the complexities they present: 'I don't think IPP were ever intended to be used as they eventually came to be used. We saw a few people getting these sentences then almost an exponential explosion of people receiving this type of sentence.

'In some of the cases I worked with there would be a really big gap. Someone had committed an offence when they were 19 or 20, and then gone on to commit another offence in their 40s and were given an IPP sentence. That man is still in prison now two decades over tariff.'

'We should not underestimate the impact'

After leaving the prison service Sophie turned her attention to campaigning against IP, supporting grassroots efforts by the families of people serving IPP. 'I was a former prison psychologist so I knew I potentially wasn't going to be seen as an ally, but I said, "my skills are yours and if I can be helpful, I want to help", and they did take me up on that, which was very good of them.

'I had the privilege of assisting with the launch of UNGRIPP (United Group for Reform of IPP). Under the leadership of Donna Mooney, it has gone to heights we never imagined at the time. But then it was a grassroots campaigning and influencing effort, and the first thing we did was look at what inquiries were happening and wrote to them with evidence.'

Some of the work Sophie has done has involved drawing attention to research evidence on the psychological impacts of IPP. She wrote a review of the evidence for the Justice Committee Inquiry into Mental Health in Prisons in 2021 and argued in that paper that the psychological impact of IPP could be categorised into three symptom clusters.

'The first thing is a pervasive sense of injustice, which in itself is not often described as a mental health symptom. But I think we should not underestimate the impact, the psychological sequelae, of feeling that you are being treated unjustly.'

The second area Sophie highlighted was the perpetual, chronic anxiety borne from the uncertainty of not having a release date. 'I cannot believe how many people still underestimate the enormity of not having a release date from prison. It destroys people. How does someone plan for the future, when they don't know what that future is going to look like? And yet, that's what we ask them to do, we ask them to set goals for after their release and to ask that of someone who doesn't know what's going to happen is cruel. Not intentionally, but I think we have a blind spot about how pervasive that anxiety is and how that then can drive people to use drugs just to cope with it.'

The third cluster of symptoms, Sophie said, was hopelessness and despair which she said was the ultimate expression of prisoners not knowing their release date and trying and failing to be released. 'We can relate it back to that classic psychology experiment into learned helplessness where a dog is in a room and the floor is electrified, it can jump into another room, but the floor there is also electrified. Even when the dog can escape it stops trying to. We need to apply a basic understanding of human behaviour to what we are doing to people serving IPP.'

Nic Bowes also highlighted the fact that those serving IPP are at much higher risk of self-harm and dying by suicide. 'We've got statistics that reflect a sense of helplessness and the distress as a consequence of that. We see that rates of self-harm and, unfortunately, self-inflicted deaths are higher in the IPP population than in other prison populations. The self-harm rate is double, sometimes triple compared to other sentenced groups.'

'It shifted the needle'

As part of her campaigning efforts, Sophie began an email network of other psychological professionals who were also willing to put their name to statements and evidence against IPP. 'In a way I was the worst person to start this, because I left the profession before getting my HCPC registration, I'm not lettered, I'm not qualified. Who am I to be saying anything? So I applied the same logic that UNGRIPP had applied so successfully, which was starting with the grassroots, getting a lot of people to say the same thing in the same forum and see what happened.'

Nic, who was then-chair of the Division of Forensic Psychology (DFP) was one of the psychologists who supported Sophie's efforts: 'When I became chair of the DFP I had a number of psychologists getting in touch saying that we needed to speak out about IPP sentences and the experiences of those serving them. It felt important to do that and this just coincided with my chairship. We were late to the table and it's really important to give credit to the families of those serving IPP and to Sophie's work, which has had the real impact.'

Sophie led the development of a submission of evidence to the Justice Committee Inquiry into IPP sentences which was signed by 50 psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, including Nic. The committee drew on this evidence in its subsequent report, including the group's evidence on the psychological harm of IPP sentences, issues with the effectiveness of offender rehabilitation programmes and the Parole Board risk assessment.

Sophie said in her campaign work it had not been easy to raise her head above the parapet to speak out on IPP, especially in the early days when there were fewer opponents. However, she said something changed after the Justice Committee report drew on the evidence she and the group of 50 psychological professionals submitted.

'One of the biggest achievements of that inquiry wasn't the tangibles, it was how it shifted the needle on what it was acceptable to say. It's now totally fine to say, "I'm against IPP" but pre-inquiry, when I was starting a lot of this campaigning, it wasn't okay and I worried about attracting criticism. But I was in a much better position than my peers who had something to lose, people in positions of authority or leadership had further to fall, and trainees who had their qualifications to think about. Many of those psychologists wanted to say something but felt the stranglehold of the Civil Service. There's no way I could've done all of this stuff as an HMPPS employee.'

Nic agreed with this and talked about the difficulties of challenging policy when working as civil servants. Often the people who know what needs to be changed find it difficult or impossible to engage in consultations on those Government policy changes. There was a sense of moral injury associated with being opposed to poor legislation and being unable to speak out about it because of restrictions on civil servants. Nic said: 'Many of us working in the justice system work here because we have strong values associated with justice and fairness. When the system is changed and we see sentences labelled "unjust" and "unfair", it becomes difficult for us to know how to support people in that position.'

Nic said she felt this campaign work had helped to increase confidence so that significant changes could be achieved. 'There have been changes in legislation as a result of this work. That is a massive thing to have achieved – perhaps beyond what people thought was possible. It demonstrates the importance of professional bodies like the BPS, feeding into policy consultations representing the views of members to improve the situations of people we work with.'

Evoking the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nic said 'We obviously need to support people to get out of the "stream", but as psychologists, we also need to be keeping an eye upstream on that legislation so that people don't end up "falling in". We need to do both.'

The BPS also put out statements challenging IPP thanks to Sophie and Nic's joint efforts. Sophie said that although psychologists couldn't challenge IPP alone, they have a great deal of useful insight. 'Psychologists have a high degree of understanding of what it's like to work with people serving IPP, of risk, of need, of all those things that nobody but us could say. The whole campaign was a joint professional effort, which was lovely. Well, it wasn't lovely at the time – I was tearing my hair out! – but to be able to look back and say everyone worked together was really nice, we had a common cause. One of the best moments for me was when the Probation Institute agreed to say something alongside the BPS.

'I also want to thank every single psychologist and other professionals who contacted me, who signed evidence submissions, briefings, letters, shared their professional concerns and even wrote to their MPs. Your ethical efforts helped to change the law, and it was a brave and principled thing for you to do.'

'The campaign is not over'

In recent times, changes have been introduced for those sentenced to IPP. Previously, those who had been released would have remained on licence for 10 years before this could be reviewed by the Parole Board. In November 2024, 1,800 people who had been out of prison for five years had their licence terminated. From February 1 those sentenced to IPP, whose licence had not already been reviewed by the Parole Board, would have their licence referred to the Parole Board for a termination review three years after their release from prison.

Despite these changes, Sophie said there is still much to be done: 'The IPP campaign, in many people's eyes, is not over until nobody is suffering from IPP anymore. We achieved a huge milestone in November when 1,800 people were suddenly free in a way they never really expected. I've personally advocated for resentencing for years, but it's also important to be sensitive to the genuine plight that people serving IPP are in and not to raise false hopes, not to get so carried away on our own views and victories that we don't deploy enough smart tactics for actually achieving resentencing. At the moment it's unlikely we're going to get to that.'

Nic said it was vital to remember the human cost of IPP sentences: 'People and their families are, and continue to be, affected by these sentences. Some people cannot ever be released because they died during their sentence, which has devastated families. There are many people whose lives have been really significantly affected by these sentences and there are ripple effects to that.'

Sophie added that it was important to understand that the IPP was a type of sentence, not a type of person. 'There's a real danger of treating people serving IPPs as a class of person. A uniquely dangerous type of offender did not arise between 2005 and 2012 and then go away. We just happened to create a framework that drew a lot of people into the sentence, and that means you've got heterogeneity within the sentence group, from minor to major offences. But the most important thing that unites people serving IPP is the sentence they're serving.'

• See also our Forensic Psychology collection.