TRASHFUTURE - Life Sentences by Stealth: Nate Interviews Sam Asumadu about IPPs

Episode Date: February 13, 2022

In this special extra segment, Nate interviews Sam Asumadu from Media Diversified (@WritersOfColour) about the phenomenon of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), a now-banned sentence that has resulted in thousands of British residents effectively receiving life sentences for acts as minor as stealing a mobile phone at age 17. Sam’s written an article on the topic for OpenDemocracy, which is available here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/families-plea-over-barbaric-indefinite-prison-sentences-for-minor-crimes/ Check out Media Diversified’s Linktree here: https://linktr.ee/mediadiversified *MILO ALERT* Milo has a bunch of live shows this month in both London and Prague. Check them out here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Trash Future. It is me, Nate, today. The rest of the cast are off, but I have an opportunity to speak with Sam Asumaru from Media Diversified about a specific issue which is the unbelievable situation created by something in the UK called indefinite sentences for public protection. Sam has done a ton of research and is campaigning on this issue, something that I was completely unaware of. When I have spoken to other British friends about this, they are also mostly unaware of this. Sam, I wanted to welcome you to the show and give you an opportunity to summarize at first what IPPs are and the kinds of situations you have encountered when researching this. Thank you for inviting me on. Firstly, I think I invited

myself on. I said I have written an article that is coming out in Open Democracy. It is an exclusive. Will you have me on to talk about it just to make sure things are on record? I should mention that and thank you. What they are, the sentences, are something that came in in 2005 by the then Justice Secretary of State, David Blunkett. Between 2005 and 2013, they were banned in 2012. They were deemed unlawful in 2012. Between 2005 and 2013, 8,711 people in England and Wales were given this type of sentence. It is a de facto life sentence by the back door. This sort of sentence, life sentences, were reserved before 2005 for people who had committed murder. The most serious cases of manslaughter, GBH and rape. However, in 2003, the Criminal Justice

Act came in, which introduced the indeterminate sentence for public protection. I am going to call it IPP because that is a bit of a long-winded thing. It is a life sentence, more or less. It is only sort of interrupted by parole boards every now and again. You have a parole hearing and they might let you go, but quite often they do not. Anyway, so when they brought it in, they actually expanded those terms. Instead of just murder serious manslaughter, rape and so on, they expanded what you could be imprisoned for to things like burglary and a fray. They added another 153 crimes that you could get this type of sentence for. Many of these had never previously had. You could not get a life sentence for that, obviously,

because stealing my phone does not scream, let us put them in prison forever. In 2012, the IPP sentence was abolished by the government, but it was not, most importantly, and I hope everybody listens to this, but it was not abolished retrospectively. That means all those people who were imprisoned on an IPP before 2012 were still in prison. At this time, at least, there are still 3,252 people who are still serving prison sentences, IPP prison sentences. Can I interrupt you for a second? I want to give people a quick example of what this means. So in your reporting, you have, for example, encountered somebody who at the age of 17 was arrested for stealing a mobile phone and was, I believe, sentenced to 15 months in prison,

but because of the IPP, the way that it worked, effectively, they were, for the rest of their lives, could be called back to prison. They were basically on probation forever, and you found examples of people missing a meeting with their parole officer then being res sentenced to prison, or if they were living in a halfway house or something like sort of post-prison release housing, they got in trouble for drinking alcohol, got sentenced back to prison. In one case, somebody had been attacked but had not hit someone back. They had been hit in a fight. Basically, they had been aggressed, but they were then sent back to prison. So your situations were people who were arrested as teenagers are in their late 30s, entering

their early 40s, and in some cases, are still in prison for a charge that... I mean, they're not in prison for that anymore. What they're in prison for is because of how they've been treated. They've become institutionalized in prison. Their mental health has failed. There's a psychosis that's happened to them. That is what they're still in prison for, not for stealing mobile phones at this point, which the government know, because in November 2021, I mean, they knew this before, but there was a Justice Committee, so that's when people go in and give testimony in their parliament and all these little things. And the subject was imprisonment for public protection IPP censors. And there, at that meeting, which was filmed, you can find it

on parliament.live, Dr Dnish Maganti, who is a consultant forensic psychiatrist and clinical lead for a secure psychiatric service in one of these prisons. His particular one was for Birmingham Solihull Health Foundation Trust. And he told the committee, and I'll just read out a bit because I don't want to have a monologue here, but so he said, I've worked with IPP prisoners as patients right from the day the IPP came in as lead for one of the largest prisoners in the country at that stage and continue to work with them up until yesterday. Really, for me, the major lessons that we've learned, firstly, they are not a homogeneous group. So we have at one end of the spectrum quite high risk individuals who've committed very serious offenses. Yet at the other

end of the spectrum of individual who have not, who have come to, you know, they've come because relatively less severe, even minor things that have happened, in some instances, who are within the IPP group. So he then goes on to talk about them separately. So his focus is on mental health aspects of IPP prisoners, as obviously as a doctor. And so in context, so carry on for what he says, he says, and in that context, there are a large group of prisoners, patients who are in the less severe offense group. We learned quite a lot from that group initially when we started out, when they started coming in 2005 and 2006, they didn't know what the centers was. And to be honest, we didn't understand it very well either. They would come in with a tariff. The tariff I've

explained to you is what they're given is like the minimum sentence, not that they knew that at the time, because the judges weren't trained in what this sentence was. And so they, so these people with the tariff would be grouped together as lifers. And he says literally went down the life of pathway. And I think, you know, that's something you could look into a bit more, like what is the life of pathway. But so as a consultant forensic psychiatrist, for one of the biggest prisons, he goes on to say they came in with short tariffs and would still be there after the tariff was finished in a local prison. And then they thought they were going to be released. And we presumed that they would be. So the doctors thought they would be. However, the offenders programs that

they were supposed to do just didn't materialize. And then as we continue to work with that group, there was a distinct change in their presentation. Initially, they were young men or women in some cases, but largely young men who had come in who were not severely mentally ill. But as the years have gone by, increasingly, what we are finding is they are becoming mentally ill. Their clinical presentation is increasingly akin to those who've been wrongfully convicted. They present with anxiety. They present with depression, a great deal of mistrust of the criminal justice system. What has been happening is then there was initially a rebellion against that. They figured we're supposed to get out. So you end up in a situation where that risk,

that behavioral disturbance was used as a risk indicator, not to release them, not the original fence or their criminal history outside the prison, but their behavior in prison. And so their mental health needs, as it were, their anxiety, depression, and eventually psychosis, in some cases, were used as a risk indicator. And when that occurred, it led to a system of them being perpetually in prison. And that led to a sense of helplessness. And quite a lot of them have become institutionalized. It's difficult for them to move forward. And that's a doctor who's worked from 2005. So what is that, 17 years now? That's what he's saying in parliament. And it's sad because, I mean, he doesn't specifically say it, but a lot of these people

have killed themselves in prison because of that. And I noticed in your reporting, you mentioned that the people that suicidal ideation and suicide is quite common. And it's one of those things where people express surprise at this, or it's sort of like, well, how are these people still in prison? It's like, well, as you pointed out, the mental health breaks down when they've been basically on a completely over exaggerated sentence, they have become affected by the sentence. And that's changed their behavior and demeanor. And then that provides a pretext for them to say, oh, these people are at risk. Nasty little circle.

I'm reminded, I didn't know this in the letter that you were circulating, trying to urge the government to act. There was a reference to the Khalif Browder story. And that was the first thing that this reminded me of. I was living in New York when that happened, a kid was arrested on suspicion of having stolen a backpack from a store. There was no real evidence to it, but he was just a black teenager that the cops thought was disposable. And by the time that his family didn't have money to make bail, and on a long enough timeline of being held at Rikers Island for, I think, like three years, awaiting just an arraignment, he kept being put in solitary confinement and eventually was released after a significant

amount of activism and went up committing suicide at home after having been released. And it's one of these reminders where it's like there was no evidence that he had committed any crime at all. The impediment was basically his family couldn't afford the bond that the state had said, you have to pay to get him out. And he lived as a teenager, as I think he was 16 when he was arrested in horrific conditions at Rikers Island, and not even awaiting, not in prison, not sentenced, awaiting basically arraignment. Every time that the public defender and him would show up, they would then delay the case because the prosecution was like, oh yeah, we don't have this ready and the judge would be granted deferral. And it's like, on a long enough

timeline, this is just destructive to someone's psyche. And that was the first thing I thought of that like, okay, someone commits a crime like when they're a teenager, a minor crime, like you said, a minor theft, like a nonviolent theft, like people getting in a scuffle, things along those lines, but then the system basically grants itself the authority to continue imprisoning someone for, in some of these cases, 17 years. Yeah, yeah. The longest people have been at 17 years from when they, you know, they first went in, they went gung-ho with them imprisoning these black, brown and white working class men and women. And I mean, I'd be remiss in saying of not highly lighting one case of a woman called Charlotte Noakes. And so the reason I know about Charlotte

Noakes is because of her inquest, because she died in 2016. She was serving an indefinite imprisonment for public protection. And she was basically over seven years over her minimum tariff when she died. So she was only supposed to be in, I think, of like 15 months, but you know, she was in seven years past that. And so in the inquest into the death of Charlotte, they concluded that the jury concluded that they found her death was by natural causes. I mean, Charlotte was 38 when she was found dead in her cell in HMP, Peterborough. So natural causes sounds a little bit ridiculous to me. What was she charged with? What was the original tariff for? You know, do you know what? I don't know and I don't care. And I've told this

to people publicly, it does not matter what crime they did. But one, it definitely wasn't murder or any of these things. So it doesn't matter to me. But I just, I'm taking it back. The reason I ask is because I'm taking it back by like the idea that being sentenced to over a year in prison as a teenager for, you know, one of the examples you brought up stealing a mobile phone, like that seems so... There's a lot of them there in there for stealing mobile phones. And it just seems so incredibly draconian for such a minor crime. And then this system allows it to become effectively a life sentence. I mean, it's just bananas to me. Like I'm... Yeah, it's shocking. It's shocking. I mean, she, I mean, if she had been released seven years earlier,

I think she for one wouldn't be dead. But what happened is, so she is one of four women who've died serving an IPP sentence, which is really concerning. There's been lots more men. But the thing with Charlotte is she, you know, she was okay. So yeah, let's, I mean, I think it's important to humanize these people because that is what they have. They've been dehumanized by the state. But she was known to her family as Charlie or Lottie. And, you know, she was funny. She was creative, very creative, actually. She started doing a lot of art in prison. And she was, you know, she had her work, her work that she did in prison, exhibited by the Costler Trust. She'd also, you know, she just, she got a scholarship to study at Central St. Martin's upon her release.

Yeah. So she's just looking to get out and be, you know, Central St. Martin is a really highly respected like art school. And she had a place there. And so she was given the sentence in 2008. And then she was supposed to serve a minimum of 15 months. But she served by the time she was died, found dead in her cell, she'd been there eight and a half years. And then so, I mean, the jury, sorry, the inquest said, you know, they talked to the family and the family said that she's described her sentence to her family as a death sentence. Yeah. And, you know, she was, she was like, you know, the justifications of people at these inquest, they're saying that Charlotte wasn't ready to engage with her therapeutic needs and so on. Did she have

therapeutic needs when she was, you know, when she was first in prison? Yeah, when she was brought in. Yeah, you wonder. And so then they're saying that she was diagnosed with a personality disorder and so on. And so they gave her anti psychotic drugs to treat her symptoms. So but however, which is I'm trying to look into this further. So in the months leading up to her death, she often, you know, she appeared sedated, drowsy and slurring her speech. And then they found that they would, they were administrating, administering the medication she was on, but unusually long periods. So, so, so, I mean, I've just heard so many horrendous stories and that's just one of them.

I'm really taken aback by this. I wanted to point out because there's a similar situation with, I followed this, the story with regard to no recourse to public funds and the way that asylum seekers are treated in this country. And I'm linking these two together because these are both policies that came in under new labor, under Tony Blair, that then in the aftermath of them being applied and to the cruelest extent possible, people then, even the people involved, in this case, David Blunkett, but other people were involved with asylum seekers said the same thing, like, oh, we never intended it to be this harsh, this is a miscarriage of justice, this is counter productive. And yet it keeps happening. And, and like you said, in the case of IPPs.

Well, they're always going in trouble now. I mean, it's in there and they've got, they're just going with it because that's what's labor bought in. But the thing is, remember, if you go back to that time, 2005, so on, you know, Tony Blair's government, there was a really horrendous atmosphere for young people, for young working class people, there was the asbo's and that sort of thing. Yeah, the anti congregation like sound, you know, those are the mosquitoes or like that, the lights that are supposed to highlight the blemishes on teenagers faces. Like, all of that stuff is, I mean, in the case of, in the case of refugees, basically, they later tried to, you know, they tried to apologize and say, oh,

we never intended for the ban on working for asylum seekers to last any longer than six months. And for people who aren't aware of the situation in the UK, if you're an asylum seeker, while your case is being decided, and this can take years, I believe it's you're allotted 39 pounds per week to per person, but you're not allowed to work, which means, you know, you have to live in whatever housing they put you in, which is typically very, very squalid. You are allowed zero independence. And they then turn around and say, oh, well, you know, you're, we never, we never expected this to last this long. But, you know, now the government has the power to be this as cruel as possible. And they're using it. And I think that the one thing I would say before I

head back over is the extent to which, you know, they've even determined they've now since banned IPPs, but refuse to apply that retroactively to the people who who are still serving convictions for, for something. And in most of these cases, it's, it's just like, okay, in the US, you have, you may have heard of three strikes laws. I think this was pioneered in California, but became really popular. You also have things like mandatory minimum sentences, which specifically were applied for, for drug convictions, but other, for other things too. So mandatory minimums take discretion out of the judge's hands. If someone's convicted of a crime, they, a judge cannot sentence them to less than a certain amount. So you'll have situations in which somebody on like

a first time offense, a young person with, you know, a very small amount of drugs, you know, or just over a certain threshold could, you know, be automatically sentenced to 10 years in prison, 20 years in prison, you know, when they're 18. And this is a first time offense. And go ahead, sorry. That happens, isn't it? Because, you know, that this is a class thing as well. Because, you know, a rich liberals son or daughter is going to have some proper representation where a working class, black, brown, or white young person isn't going to have that representation. Absolutely. No, that's 100% true. Knocking people who do, what you have public, no, not public defenders. Public defenders. Not knocking them at all, but I'm assuming they have

lots of cases. Most public defenders have less than 10 minutes to review the case before they have to present it. Like they're unbelievably overworked and treated with incredible contempt. And I'll give you an example. A friend of mine in high school, he's a bit younger than me. So this, I would have been in university when he was, when he was in, in high school, or he had just graduated from high school, he had just turned 18. In our hometown, he was hanging out with some friends from school who were, you know, they were all 17, he had just turned 18, they were classmates, but they were just younger than him or they were a year behind him in school. They were, there was a neighborhood pool that was closed. And so they had climbed the fence and

they were hanging out in the pool despite it being closed. And they had alcohol and marijuana. I mean, it's not really a huge problem. It's just teenagers doing teenager things. Someone called the cops. So the cops came, they ran, they hid in someone's garage, but some, one of them got like, one of the, the, the younger kids got, got conscientious about it and basically turned them in. Our base was like called the cops because they're like, oh, we did something wrong. We have to, we have to own up to it. So my friend, because he was 18, he, the cops basically decided to charge him with all the things they would have charged all the other kids with. So he got

furnishing alcohol to a minor possession of cannabis, you know, breaking and entering all these charges. And then he was 18 years old. He was 18 and like two weeks old, was facing multiple felonies because of these and was staring at a first, for a first time offense, five years in prison. And he was able to enter into conditional discharge program because his parents were able to get the lawyer and he was able to argue it down basically to a misdemeanor. He was able to have it, expunge from his record. But for his first two years of university, for example, he had to, I believe he had, he didn't have for an ankle monitor, but he had to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and was basically meeting

with a, meeting with a parole officer, I think monthly. And he even told me, you know, as an 18 year old, he was just like, this is, it's just pay to play. Like if I didn't have money, if my parents didn't have any money, then I would be in prison and I'd be a felon. And because they had enough money to hire a lawyer, like I can make this go away. And he's like, it's just, it's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. And you look at that in the United States, and you see that same mentality. I briefly mentioned three strikes laws, typically the way those would work is that if someone had been convicted of any violent defense, if they had two more charges, no matter how minor, they would be sentenced to life in prison. So a famous

example in California was a guy who had like a, he had like an assault and battery charge when he was very young. And then later in life, after being released from prison, had gotten in trouble for like two minor theft charges, one of which was stealing a slice of pizza and got sentenced to life in prison. And that punitive carceral mentality was massive in the United States and still is, but was even more so in the 90s. And it seems like in Britain it was in the 2000s. Well, you in prison, most people are percentage-wise in the world. Doesn't America do that? Yeah, I believe we may have the most people both percentage-wise and also just by numbers in prison. And that mentality, it feels to me like that mentality of finding as many

sort of roundabout ways to discipline and punish for lack of a better expression. That was really the kind of zeitgeist in Britain in the early 2000s. And seeing this kind of thing, like we're just describing with IPPs, like the idea that even this far down the road, you can look at the consequences of this and not acknowledge that a wrong has been committed, that regardless of what people did, like the idea that minor crimes that previously probably wouldn't even have gotten a custodial sentence are resulting in people getting effectively licenses. 17 years, yeah. I mean, it is incredible. And I hadn't heard of it up until about a month ago. And since then, I've heard horror story after horror story, these prisoners, they're self-harming, they're gouging their arms,

so much stuff has happened to these prisoners. And maybe we'll go into it, but I guess you'll have to give your listeners a bit of a warning on that. And I would just throw this in that like that then, I presume becomes justification for them to say, oh, this person can't be released because they're self-harming. Exactly. Exactly. That's what, what I, with that quote from the doctor who, yeah, the doctor quote that I said earlier, that's exactly what's happening. This is because they are then self-harming. That means they can't go out because they're a danger to it's a horrible, horrible cycle. But I mean, I must, again, I'd be remiss if I didn't say we started this podcast late because I was dealing with the Ministry of Justice who I'm trying to get

to go on record with their comments on some of the questions I've asked. And even now, I've had another email from them while we've been talking, which I'll have to open once we finished and deal with them again because it's just obfuscation and delay with them, but they have got till 5pm to answer my questions. But let me ask you, what was it that you wanted to ask them? Like, what were the questions? Because I feel like that's important to put out there. So yeah, I'll go through them. I think I've given them six questions and I'll read them out. So the first one, the IPP was deemed unlawful in 2012. Why haven't you released prisoners with that sentence who were imprisoned before that date? So retrospectively let them out. So many prisoners

have now done between 11 to 17 year sentences with no end in sight. So that's question one. Question two was why aren't people prescribed with methadone allowed into an open prison? And that was related to Leroy Douglas. He's someone who went in for a mobile phone stealing with no violence and he's there still 17 years. He's been moved from prison to prison. The contact that I have with him is through another woman, a campaigner and she's been fighting his case for a long time and she's found over those 17 years, he's been moved so many, well, I think she's been around for about 12 years trying to help him. He's been around, moved to prison to prison so many times and she finds it hard to keep track of him. So that was one, oh sorry, and so he is on methadone

for pain and they're saying that he can't release because of that. So Leroy Douglas, question three. Leroy Douglas should have been transferred to a D category open prison in June last year and also Leroy's teenage daughter died last year and he was not allowed to go to her funeral. He was told by prison officers that he had been in prison so long that he could not have bonded with his daughter and Leroy has been moved around the prison estate almost every year since he's been inside. He had a two and a half year tariff for stealing a mobile phone without prison, without violence and has been inside prison for 70 years and I asked him why has he not been released and I bolded that question. Question number four I asked is why doesn't the prison service inform

families or friends that they are being transferred to another prison? And that was based on some correspondence I've had with a woman, well she might even be a teenager, I'm not sure, of her age, Sofira, whose uncle is in prison and has been for about 17 years based on one of these, he's been in prison since he was 25 and I'll go into his case a bit more but she at the time we were corresponding, actually he was yesterday, I should say, was saying that she doesn't know where her uncle is because he's been moved. Thankfully a couple of hours later she did find out from the other campaigner I mentioned Shirley Lloyd who's done so much great work on this but he for however many years has been moved from prison to prison made lots of complaints

and it hasn't been dealt with and I will go into his case a bit more but the fifth question I asked was Garth O'Hagan was released to a hostel after doing 11 years of a 17 month tariff. He was 17 year olds when he was sentenced he was released to a hostel, spent two years there before the contract expired. He was recalled but then the probation service found another hostel for him so he could stay out but there he was savagely attacked by another person and didn't feel safe so he told the probation service can they move him or put him back in prison and so the probation service told him to breach his license conditions so that they could recall him and I've asked them is the question in bold is this normal practice and so he stayed at a friend's

house that night and handed himself into probation the next morning and all of this just to keep himself safe yeah and the last question I asked was about Mohammed Nazir Khan which I mentioned before so he has been in HM long lart and prison on an IPP sentence and his niece Zafira Zalfika isn't sure which prison he's in and he's been moved recently he was sentenced in 2005 at 25 years old the initial sentence was 21 months long yet it has been 16 years he's served 14 years over time so you know he's been out a little bit yeah so Zafira wrote to me that he had been to Birmingham and came back to Wakefield drunk his step cousins two men attacked him outside his home and in the fight one of them had been wounded by a knife the wound was only one centimeter in depth and three centimeters

in width the jury found him guilty of the charge section 18 wound wounding with intent as far as his family is concerned his crime was self-defense remember they attacked him outside his house yeah so Zafira's email said that he's been assaulted by officers in prison he's tried multiple times to file complaints and charges but they've gone nowhere uh during Covid he and other prisoners have been in lockdown for around 23 hours a day so Zafira contacted her local MP Imran Ahmad Khan of the Wakefield constituency but however he's a conservative MP he's been suspended due to due to his own court case and so the issue he was at the time taking it on to minister Lucy Fraser who's now you know she's gone she's not the prison's officer so so so Zafira has been thwarted at

every point at every every state it seems like government churn basically means that then the one point of contact changes and they start the whole process over again yeah and so so apparently they basically everybody's been really extremely unhelpful and they've said that he's not completed his courses when he the courses that they make them do when in actuality he has completed many courses but the prison he's in hasn't been offering all the courses that he needs to do to get out so I asked them what is the ministry's position on this and do I need to file a FOIA freedom of information at a question to find out what his complaints have been because if so I will contact mark what's at the freedom of information centre and so that's the email I sent to them

last night they were emailing me back but I last night but I was not in so I've been dealing with it this morning but um but but you know I mean there's more and I've sent them so they then asked me which probation service was Garth in the one I mentioned and so I have sent them this back once Garth handed himself into probation he was recalled to prison and sent around spent around a year inside he was directed for release to a hostel and eventually found his own accommodation with the help of the probation service and the council early last year Garth went for a drink with a friend a fight broke out amongst a group of people that Garth had no connections with one of this group punched Garth Garth did not retaliate but the man punched Garth again

and Garth had to defend himself three of the group were arrested and so was Garth all were bailed until police carried out further into investigation however because Garth is an IPP prisoner he was recalled to prison in December the police completed their inquiry and exonerated Garth from the investigation as he was found innocent however as he is an IPP he has to wait for parole in prison so Garth had a parole in January but it was postponed because it was found out that there were adjudications on his file that belonged to another prisoner and so it was also adjourned because his probation did not have a release plan for him which is the requirement for parole for IPP parole hearings and so Garth is still inside waiting indefinitely for a parole

hearing for something he's been he's been found innocent of and it's like why would you need a release plan for somebody when it's they were arrested in error absolutely horrendous I mean Nate I'm it goes deeper and darker every time I read stuff that you know the home office are involved as well because they deport some of these prisoners as well of course I mean yeah yeah so I've given them till five o'clock today I don't know what they've sent another email again just delay delaying email and I'm and and I've asked them so is this your comment then is that what you want me to publish and I guess that's what he's replying to which I'm ignoring until we finish the talking but yeah so so what I want to as a way of wrapping up then what I wanted to ask you

was I know that that you have a piece coming out in open democracy and and when that's released I'll I'll I'll time this so that it's released you know with a link to that but for people who want to get involved or at least you know sign on to petitions to things along those lines or any kind of activism like are there resources or things they should know about oh absolutely so so on social media there's a hashtag called justice for IPPs so uh word justice for f or IPPs that's on the end there and you can if you click on that hashtag you can find links the petitions you can find stories of people and so on it's the same on instagram actually if you go to instagram writers of color i'll call media diverse right as well but the url is right as a color and you go

to our link tree there's all the linked petitions and resources to read up and stuff about it obviously we so so uh Shirley um Shirley Lloyd has uh put to wrote that joint statement that's coming out probably um probably tomorrow I'm hoping tomorrow because I can't deal with them at moj much longer um but um in in in that uh she's written a lot about what's what IPPs are and she's addressed it to uh Donna Robb who is the um who is the uh justice secretary at the moment and she's collected 50 signatures of uh of um you know people of people of no civil society people uh which includes sort of uh michael mansfield qc um uh chris doors qc also myself and then we've got a lot of journalists who've signed it as well catlin moran from the times um uh laury penny

who the writer screenwriter and and author sarah o'connell another journalist um also susan moore at the daily telegraph then owin jones actually the author for and uh journalist from the guardian and then more people even peter thatch who has signed it you know some really like uh um uh notable people hallima begum of the chief executive officer of the of runny mead also that you know the the director of the center for crime and justice studies all of these people are coming together so you're putting their necks on the line because a lot of people don't want to be connected to ipps everybody's washing their hands of it but these 50 people including yourself actually that is true i'm on there i think what number are you on this you're number 47 on the list

Nate bethia writer and producer trust future podcast have signed this you know um the editor of the canary has signed it there's lots of great people who've done it madney unis who used to run the british theater is now in new york he's like a british guy who's in america concerned about this amrit singh path from the seat council and so that is going to be um it would be published tomorrow it should be i'm hoping there's not much more delay and uh the letter would be published it you know um donnie rubb it's be it's been sent to him already or it's been sent to the ministry of justice press department really so they're very aware of who who who signed it and what's in the letter um you know there's a chart of psychologists and academic in there and so and so and lee jasper

too so so um actually i should also say sam grant head of policy and campaigns of liberty so this is notable people putting their neck on the line to say stop this sentence this is ridiculous you need to retrospectively let these people out and you need to give them the resources they need because they have been institutionalized at this point they have mental health problems they that you know it it wouldn't it wouldn't be safe for them to be in the community in some ways because they don't have the resources they need and they need to get back into work and how do you do it we went in as a teenager you missed your most of your adult life now and then you've got to reintegrate yourself into society so so so so yes please sign the petition i mean we

only have a month left of it because it closed it's been up for like five months i got involved about a month ago and it's been so slow watching those um those uh signatures come in where i got involved in the national anti-inboarders bill when it was at 2000 and we promoted it promoted it went over 3000 300 000 in a matter of weeks yeah this has been going on for ages and we're at 1000 and something it's so it's so incredibly heartbreaking that people aren't there for the black white and brown working classes and you know what in my research i found that is a lot of it is white working class people uh uh teenagers who who are imprisoned by the labor government and who the Tories have not have kept it going because bureaucracy i don't know why else because anybody

can read these stories and see how unjust they are so it is pure bureaucracy and also maybe there's money involved in there that's what i'm hearing as well but i can't put that on the record yeah so i'm just what i would say the two is just gets me is that i think about you know i i had a uh a stupid encounter with police where i went up getting charged for something and had to do a conditional discharge thing when i was 20 years old and it was really dumb and it was just me being you know being a moron and you know i i i regret it but it was the basically the only the only people who were harmed in it were the cops i basically wasted the cops time and so they charged me with false informing and i think about that like had they had i not had the resources you know

that would have drastically uh affected my life had i not just had the you know six hundred dollars to pay for entry into the conditional discharge program um if i didn't have you know the resources to know that i needed to get my record expunged as soon as it was it was possible to do so you know things along those lines and i think about like if i was british you know if i was i mean i'm a british citizen but if i'd grown up here um i you know have i gotten wrapped up in something you know with the law because there's just something done that you know people do when they're young you know it's something they'd regret and it's something that has you know you could make amends for you know it's entirely possible these people are my age i mean it's people in their late 30s

that's that's how old i am like and i think about where i was in 2005 when i got arrested like quite frankly uh you know so much as i just the the concept of being institutionalized from then like how would you relate to the adult world how would you relate to the rest of your life if all that time you'd been either imprisoned or under threat of imprisonment i mean surely surely the campaigner her son was imprisoned um on a two and a half year tariff and he did eight over eight years and she says he's not the same like she said no IPP prisoner when they come out are the same as when they went in that they are damaged by this by this sentence and i'm just going to say you know in 2020 there was self harm within the IPP population there was 2066

self harm incidents there were two suicides you say there's only like there's around 3,800 people that are affected by this yeah yeah yeah at the moment still on that sentence but the fact is you know they they are killing themselves in in in in in disproportionate amounts compared to other prisoners who aren't under an IPP I mean so you're saying it sounds like like just ballpark math here it sounds like that's around 60 65 percent of people who are serving IPPs have self-harmed or there's i mean they may be they may be they may be there may be maybe individuals who've committed more more than one attempt at self harm but that's that's incredible i mean some people when you say that some of them are on recourse or some of them go out but that means

that you can't you you're you're living a shadow life because there's you're scared at the time that you're going to be yeah and then any any encounter with the state means you could potentially be recalled yeah but even not the state you could have a a neighbor who just doesn't like you and they will report you and you'll be put in prison yeah and this is literally happened i mean there's one case i'm not sure i can't remember if i put it in the article or not it was just too much my article was like going over four thousand it was just getting ridiculous but he um one of things he'd gone out and record he had an argument with his girlfriend and then um and then um the neighbors called him called him and he was recalled back to prison two weeks later he hung

himself yeah yeah yeah yeah sam thank you so much for making time for this i'm really glad we can put this out on our network and get people more aware of this because this is this is just unbelievable like i think the extent to which these things in the uk seem to they take place and then are never reported on again in major major newspapers it's it's really mind-blowing and i really appreciate the fact that you've you know invested so much of your own time into investigating this and i just hope that hopefully our you know our listeners taking a break from the the comedy aspect of the show will listen to this and that and potentially if they can get involved or at least so support for remedying this because this is i mean the more i learn about this is more there's more unbelievable

it seems yeah in fact there's just one last thing i wanted to say this is um so there's an there's an ipp prisoner who i tweet with just last few weeks and you know he sent me he he he told me this i'm going to read it out he said sadly another one which is another ipp prisoner went on on the run this weekend they had told him that he was not going to be recalled then they sent three car loads of people to fetch him and so they are and he says we this is a quote from him we are constantly looking over our shoulder the stress out here is no better because freedom is not the definition that goes with ipp and that's a guy on twitter he's called john right who just tweets with me occasionally uh because he knows that i'm trying to try and do something about it

well i really hope that this at least gets enough attention on it that this can start the momentum required um and i really really appreciate you making time for this and and i will link to media diversified uh to your link tree and to your article in the show notes for this so for those of you listening look for that um at the bottom of this and uh get involved if you can thank you so much thanks mate you