March 12, 2009: England - European Leader in Imprisonment

The Howard League for Penal Reform has today highlighted figures showing more than 12,000 men and women now serve open ended or life sentences in prison in England and Wales.

Analysing figures from recent parliamentary questions in her blog, Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Frances Crook, reveals that:

• There are 5,059 prisoners serving an indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP), with around 100 new IPP prisoners going into prison a month. Only 47 IPP prisoners having been released since the sentence’s introduction in 2005
• The number of men and women serving life sentences has just peaked at an historic high of 7,031
• The total of 12,090 men, women and children serving various forms of life sentence in England and Wales is higher than 11,477 – the total of all 46 other countries in the Council of Europe added together, including Russia, Turkey, Germany and the Ukraine

Frances Crook said:

“Men, women and children serving open-ended sentences with no certain prospect of release have dramatically increased both in number and as a proportion of the prison population, at a time when straitening public finances sees useful activity being curtailed with prisoners left to spend decades lying on their bunks."

“Rather than engaging these prisoners with real work, or education and training, the government prefers to promote a culture of idleness and a dangerous discontent. When these thousands of individuals are finally released, as most will be, then society will be left to pick up the pieces."

“Urgent sentencing reform is required to recalibrate the system to a realistic vision of what the criminal justice system can and can’t do, beginning with the abandonment of the unjust, utterly impractical and grossly expensive indeterminate sentence for public protection.”