Help us to change the release test for the IPP prisoners under Section 128 of the LASPO Act.. Template letter provided in support for .

We are asking  Elizabeth Truss to  be committed to change the situation for IPP prisoners. Help us get justice by posting the Template provided adding your own words. Campaign to Elizabeth Truss to change the release test  We do need you but Who can help make change difference the  public, law solicitors, Barrister, agency, newspapers, IPP prisoners and all inmates and families anyone willing to help, we need you.

 



“Michael Gove quoted post date 2010 We should not compel those who have made mistakes to live forever defined by those mistakes. He did not understand the 2 strike IPP system for lifers are forced to live defined by their mistakes.

 

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FAO Rt Hon. Ms Elizabeth Truss

Ministry of Justice

102 Petty France

London

SW1H 9AJ

Dear Rt Honourable Elizabeth Truss, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

IPP PRISONERS

Congratulations on being elected as the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice to the 2016 Parliament.  I am asking for your support on an issue that is extremely important to my family and myself, and also for your advice on how we can achieve the necessary changes in the law to protect victims both in our constituency and UK-wide.

We are asking you to be committed to change the situation for IPP Prisoners.

Firstly, we would ask you to exercise your powers to change the release test for the IPP Prisoners under Section 128 of the LASPO Act, so that the basic premise is that the Prisoner is safe to be released, unless there are exceptionally strong arguments against this.

Secondly, we would also ask you to remove the “99 year licence”.  As a consequence of this licence a large number of potential workers (ex-Prisoners) get ignored by employers because of their Criminal Record.  Everyone should be entitled to a second chance in life whether they had committed a crime or not.  Currently, the liability of the licence and the discrimination not only affects the Prisoners themselves but their family’s health and mental state.

At the very least, the Law already provides for long licence periods for ordinary Prisoners who need close monitoring on Release, by “extended” sentences.  These could be applied to IPP Prisoners, thus giving them a definite release date and an end to the often unbearable uncertainty and hopelessness of their situation.

Our loved ones have paid the penalty and done their time – sometimes several times over or on most occasions for nothing.  Now it is time to give them their lives back.

<PERSONAL STORY HERE> - add the line:  “This issue has deeply affected my family.”

I am looking to you to act justly and to put an end – finally - to this “stain on the British justice system”.

Yours sincerely,

Katherine Gleeson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A snap shot Summary

 

 

Impact of a 99 year licence to me my family / children/ work/ health?

I got out of prison and recalled 3 times in 2 years  this will continue for 99 years after my release I will wait on remand each time with no legal aid.
IPPS on release with a  99 year licence  has huge problems along with not being released  from the clutches of  probation 7 years after they have been  released. 

 

Those IPPs 2 strikes unless we change the law the life licence will remain .

Those on release  have  parole officers  change at a alarming rate which is damming as  officers don't get a chance to get to know the person  therefore how can you progress you forward. Those on release  continue to build a repo with  there Parole officers only to start again and again with new parole officers …..  

prolonging and delaying not because of an offenders actions but because ex offenders gets kick around like a football many go through 7 parole officers in 1 year. Parole officers are “unable to appreciate they are rehabilitating because they can’t put it into prospective. Newly assigned probation officers are left reading ex-offender records from paper, but not as transparent as knowing the person, personally, and is only as good as notations made.

It is fundamentally key for the probation officer to get to know a person long-term and enough to gain trust to understand him or her ,to eliminate any concerns, distrust, to make decisions fairly and on time.

Reform for parole board was recorded "before 2010, less talk many could of ended there licence and attendance with probation but still attending probation 7 years after leaving prison. something is terrible wrong more so being recalled for none offence, persistently. “The reasons for which people can be recalled are broad and often vague. They include: failing to be ‘of good behaviour’, ‘failure to keep in touch’ and ‘drugs/alcohol’ amongst others. These encompass a wide range of behaviours which would be of no interest to the authorities if a person were not on licence.”

 

Then you learn why they have been  privatising the Parole Board and it all makes since. There is no incentive to let them go when they ate your wage.

Far from transforming rehabilitating for an IPP on 99 year licence being a joke, privatising the probation service and making more people subject to licence conditions has sped up the revolving door, returning people to prison and putting more pressure on a system that fails everyone.
“In the majority of cases the initial decision to recall to custody is made by a single probation officer and invariably rubber-stamped by the Secretary of State for Justice. Who likely never got to know you


Rehabilitation  if you have suffered injustice like the IPP it  does not work . Those who are kidnapped suffer the same injustice but the injustice continues with the IPP prisoners as they  get recalled for the same injustice for the rest of their life .

YOU DONT HAVE TO GIVE USE FIGURES WE KNOW.

The submission states: “Recent figures from the Ministry of Justice show that IPP prisoners are much more likely and have been self-harm than other prisoners, including those serving life sentences.

The prison reform, unsurprisingly the report found that more than half of all IPP prisoners have ‘emotional wellbeing’ problems, and had ‘relatively high suicide rates’, as well as finding themselves stuck in a ‘vicious circle’

Branding the IPP ‘absolutely inhumane and unfair’, he said that the sentence ‘totally undermined the fundamental principle of fairness.

 

Eion mcLennan Murray
who said at his annual conference of his association ipp was a blunt injustice release them, unless there is a clear evidence a prisoner is not safe.

Lord chief justice it seems to have all the faults, but no one seems to be fighting for them to be dealt with justly.
Lord brown called to postdate Gove top end the terrible scourge. Its a preventative detention, alien to our traditional criminal justice approach.

Lord Dholakia
the government should be serious about their pledge to tackle the issue. what steps are we talking to end this injustice.

 

“Michael Gove I remember your  words  we should not compel those who have made mistakes to live forever defined by those mistakes. 2 strike ipp system for lifers are forced to live defined by their mistakes.

 

IPP prisoner wrote to the inside times  if I had a gun I put to my head and pull the trigger, the only way to end it all.
23 June 2016 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03z6rp0 

 

16 IPP Deaths to many when will it end.

 

 

 

Comments

Zing

Surely continuing to impose life recall on ipp which is an evil draconian sentence, is a continuation of that same evil, and an unwillingness to stop this is actually an unwillingness to prevent further human rights abuse, the UK government has not ratified article 1 or 13 of European convention human rights (they do not agree to promote human rights nor do they give people the right to a remedy) in hra1998 uk domestic law, they are right wing totalitarian (they believe themselves to be godlike and infallible and should therefore not be challenged in anything other than a circus)

 

 

 

Inside Time Newspaper       August 2016  Issue No: 206             Page 21 - Comment

By Keith Rose

Writing in the Guardian, Michael P Jacobson recently revealed that Britain’s prison population has passed 90,000.  In addition, since the days of Michael Howard and his ‘Prison Works’ mantra the length of sentences has increased by 33%.  Now one in seven of prisoners serve more than ten years whilst the number of lifers and other long term prisoners has risen to nearly 20% of the incarcerated, with an average stay of more than seventeen years.

 

Howard, Straw, Blunkett and latterly Grayling, were slavish devotees of the United States prison model which imprisons a great percentage of its population than any other country on earth.  The United States currently imprisons 2.2 million people, eight times the 1970 number of 295,000.  That’s 700 per 100,000 in the US, compared with Finland’s 57 per 100,000 or Sweden’s 55 per 100,000.

 

British prisons are now so seriously overcrowded that some are operating at 160% of certified capacity with a national average of 111% of capacity.

 

So how effective is this policy of mass incarceration? It’s not, in spite of Howard’s often repeated ‘Prison Works’ 46% of former prisoners are reconvicted within a year of release, often worse than they were when they entered the prison system.  Moreover, actual re-offending rates are being manipulated downwards by private probation service providers bullying staff not to report probation breaches for fear of poor-performance fines.

 

More disturbingly suicides in prisons in England & Wales have soared with 100 prison suicides from March 2015 to March 2016 meaning a suicide rate of 117 per 100,000, the highest in the world.  The United States, not exactly know for progressive, caring prisons is 15 per 100,000, India’s rate is 18 per 100,000, Canada’s 22 per 100,000.

 

In the United States, progressive and conservatives alike, those not owned by the Murdoch media, have recognised that policies of mass imprisonment have failed.  That sentences so long as to require geriatric prisons where inmates cannot even go to the toilet by themselves, let alone provide a risk to the public are a farce.  Britain is remorselessly following the same failed pathway with an ever increasing elderly population.

 

In the Queen’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament reforms to prison policies were put forward centred on giving prison governors more powers.  However, suggested Rehabilitation Programmes are not going to significantly reduce prison numbers as research suggests even the most successful programmes only reduce reoffending rates by some 10-15% which has little effort on ever-rising prison numbers.  Proposals to reduce the number of women jailed, (what happened to equality of sexes?), are a sound-bite rather than a solution to rising numbers.

 

As has been proved in the United States, you cannot build your way out of an over-crowding crisis.  Bragging about super-sized prisons, holding more than a thousand prisoners, owe more to McDonald’s slogans than a common sense solution, build them by all means, they’ll be full within weeks.

 

A re-think of the entire justice system is long overdue.  Progression of prisoners has virtually been installed in the high security estate with a soaring population of elderly Category A prisoners.  The refusal to progress prisoners ‘in denial’ has long been an obstacle to progression as the Ministry of Justice and Parole Boards have failed to recognise that there is a swelling population of the genuinely innocent being refused progression and parole due to their innocence stance.  This is foolish, the Birmingham Six et al really did happen and the Ministry of Justice should face up to the fact there are innocent people in jail receiving harsher punishment than the guilty.  Whenever the number of innocents in jail is discussed the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is trotted out as the solution.  Unfortunately the numbers don’t add up.

 

The CCRC was established nineteen years ago following a Royal Commission set up on the day the Birmingham Six were released.  Prior to the CCRC miscarriage of justice claims were handled by the Home Office’s C3 Department which was merely a whitewashing exercise.  Since its establishment in 1997 the CCRC has received 20,367 applications of which it has referred to 619 cases (3.5%), to the Appeal Court.  Of these 406 appeals (1.99%) were allowed, 178 dismissed and 12 abandoned.  The 1997 CCRC budget was £6.7m in its first year but reduced to £5.2m in 2015, a reduction in real terms of 33% with an increase in workload of 70% over the last decade.  The lack of funding is deliberate government policy to ignore and whitewash the number of innocents languishing in British jails.

 

“you cannot build your way out of an over-crowding crisis.  Bragging about super-size prisons, holding more than a thousands prisoners, owe more to McDonald’s slogans than a common sense solution”

 

I have often wondered if there is a connection between the numbers of wrongly convicted in British jails and those of self-harm.  Whilst a Listener in HMP Long Lartin I met a prisoner who had dug out his entire left forearm to the extent the bone was plainly visible.  In answer to the question ‘Why?’ his reply; ‘Waking up daily in this place for a crime I did not commit.’

 

January – December 2015, 9,458 prisoners (circa 10%) of the prison population self-harmed in 32,313 incidents, up 25% on 2014.  There were also 20,518 assaults up 27%.  When combined with the highest prison suicide rate in the world.  British prison policy should be stamped with one word: FAILURE!

 

The only winners coming out of British prison policies since Michael Howard first uttered the words, ‘prison works’, are private companies like G4S, Serco and latterly MTCnovo.  If you or I were to commit fraud on the scale of that of G4S or Serco as with the tagging fiasco we would spend decades enjoying the hospitality of Her Majesty’s hotels, not awarded further lucrative contracts.  Is MTCnovo an ideal choice to take over the Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, a children’s prison, given their history of extremely brutality in their United States prisons?  If my memory serves me correctly it was MTCnovo directors who ran the Abu Gharaib in Iraq where Iraqi prisoners were routinely tortured.

 

Michael Howard’s reign is when the concept of imprisonment changed from sending people to prison AS punishment to sending them to prison FOR punishment.  Egged on by the Murdoch press prison policies became ever more brutal with political indifference to prisoners and prison conditions.

 

We have now reached the stage where prisoners are regarded as assets to be exploited rather than treated as human.  One has only to look at pitiful prison wages which have not seen a rise for more than a quarter of a century, (the last person to veto a rise in prisoners earnings was Gordon Brown).  With sky high telephone and canteen prices, prisoner’s families are now being forced to fund their loved one’s imprisonment.  For those prisoners without family, unable to work through are or infirmity, the situation is dire indeed.  Whitemoor’s sickness and retirement pay is £3.50 weekly.

 

In 2015, Prison Industries made a profit of £5.4m for the Ministry of Justice with an average weekly wage as low as £8.  There are two words which describe that situation, ‘Slave Labour’.  A situation which exists in the United States privately run prisons.  This is the road that Britain is already on according to Michael P Jacobson and he should know; he used to run the New York City jail system.

 

So what’s my solution to the failing justice system? That’s for another article starting with criminal court failures.

 

Keith Rose is currently resident at HMP Whitemoor