'He looked like a starving dog on the floor of his cell'

IPP prisoner's mother says he is on his second hunger strike

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN

When Jacqueline Ali arrived at HMP Long Lartin to visit her eldest son, seeing the man on the other side of the bars took her breath away. Her once witty, happy-go-lucky son with dreams of leaving prison and starting a floristry business was curled up on the floor of a cramped hospital-wing cell.

After almost 60 days on hunger strike, Yusuf Ali was emaciated and looked like “a starving dog on the floor” – a shadow of his former self. The 50-year-old, who is serving an abolished indeterminate jail term described as “torture” by a UN expert, is said to have twice starved himself in desperation as he loses hope of ever being freed.

When he was handed the IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentence in 2008 for seriously injuring another prisoner, he was told he must serve a minimum of three years. But almost 16 years later, after five failed parole bids, he is still inside.

After hearing about Ali’s case, former chair of the justice committee Sir Bob Neill called for the winner of the general election on 4 July to take urgent action to help IPP prisoners. “This desperately sad case unhappily demonstrates all the harms that the Justice Committee reports warned that IPP sentences cause,” he said. “Any new government should act swiftly to erase this stain on our justice system.”

Ali’s heartbroken mother said he looked like a “skeleton” when she was allowed to visit him on compassionate grounds at the high-security Worcestershire prison in January. A letter from the prison governor, seen by this publication, confirms that she was granted the special visits because he was “critically unwell” last year.