The treatment of those trapped by indefinite prison sentences is a stain on our criminal justice system

Editorial: IPP sentences are creating a modern-day death row in a country where capital punishment has long been abolished

The self-harm rate among female IPP prisoners is more than 10 times the national average (Getty/iStock)

Two years ago, MPs warned the government that a “unique injustice” in our criminal justice system – people trapped in jail for years after receiving indeterminate sentences – was causing higher levels of self-harm and suicide than among other prisoners.

Regrettably, ministers rejected the justice select committee’s central proposal to review all the cases of prisoners serving Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences with a minimum but no maximum term.

IPP sentences, created in 2003, were abolished in 2012 on human rights grounds but not for those already serving them. This has left 2,796 prisoners still in limbo today, serving longer sentences than they were originally given. Some 1,179 of them have never been released, 705 of whom are more than 10 years beyond their original sentence. The MPs rightly described this system as “irredeemably flawed”.