Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2014 Lords Chamber

The purpose of this amendment is to bring back to some 650 of our prisoners a sense that they too are entitled to a measure of justice and fairness under the rule of law, which the Lord Chancellor is bound to uphold. I beg to move.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, in over half a century in the law, inevitably one comes across a number of injustices in individual cases of one sort or another. However, I think I can fairly say that I have never come across an injustice as plain and persistent as this on an institutionalised basis, because that is what this is, and it grows worse with every passing year.

In order to understand how truly shocking it is, it is necessary to understand three basic matters. First, preventive detention, which IPPs essentially amount to—incarcerating people on an indefinite basis, not as punishment for what they have done but to guard against the risk that they may cause harm if they are set at liberty—is basically inimical to our sense of fairness. It is true that we accept that discretionary life sentences can be passed in the cases of the most serious and dangerous offenders, but that is really a very far cry from IPPs, with which we are concerned here, which extended to no fewer than 153 specified different crimes. They were, of course, as has been explained, abolished in 2012 once the basic unfairnesses finally came to be recognised.