The government has been warned not to be “on the wrong side of history” as the plight of prisoners trapped under indefinite jail terms was compared to high-profile scandals involving the Post Office Horizon software, Windrush and infected blood products.
In an impassioned bid for the government to resentence almost 2,700 inmates who are languishing under abolished imprisonment for public protection (IPP) jail terms, Labour peer Tony Woodley called for ministers to “end this scandal and give hope at long last to the hopeless”.
“History is being written right now, and my plea to government is this: don’t be on the wrong side of history,” Lord Woodley told the House of Lords during the second reading of a bill to resentence IPP prisoners, 90 of whom have already taken their own lives in jail. “Don’t wait for the ITV drama to cast you unfairly as uncaring, cold-hearted timewasters who left damaged people, many of them broken by the state, to rot away in prison while those in power stood by wringing their hands,” he said.
Despite the intervention, prisons minister and Labour peer James Timpson said the government will not support any form of resentencing, despite at least 700 IPP prisoners having served more than 10 years beyond their minimum term.
He told the Lords that inmates should work towards release through a refreshed IPP action plan, announced yesterday, which campaigners have dismissed as “not worth the paper it’s written on”.
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