Imprisonment for public protection

jobs.justice.gov.uk. And in today's episode, we're really excited to be joined by another of our HMPPS colleagues, Dr Lisa Smith.

She's going to be talking to us about the Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection or IPP sentence and her research in this area.

And Lisa is a chartered and registered forensic psychologist and she leads the HMPPS Indeterminate Sentence Prisoner, ISP, you might hear of that.

team for psychology services, so she's an ideal expert to talk to us about this.

Her work focuses on providing advice and guidance across HMPPS on psychological services for complex and indeterminate sentence prisoners, including those serving the imprisonment for public protection sentence.

She has recently completed a doctoral thesis entitled Understanding the Barriers to Progression of Imprisonment for Public Protection Sentenced Prisoners, an Exploratory Qualitative Study.

Her research involved in-depth interviews with individuals serving those IPP sentences, HMPPS staff and parole board members, offering great insights into the systemic and psychological challenges affecting IPP progression.

So we're really looking forward to this discussion.

Here we bring you selected articles from The Skeptic, since its relaunch as an online news source in September 2020.

I'm Michael Marshall, editor of The Skeptic, and first up this week, from April 2024, it's Irredeemably Flawed, the IPP prisoner scandal and the death of Matthew Price.

Written by Emma McClure and read here by Owen Sargesson.

Please note this piece includes descriptions of mental health crises and suicide.

A famous example of that would be the ultimately unsuccessful prosecutions that followed the inquests into the Hillsborough disaster in 2016.

With regards to Matthew, an article from 28 February 2024 on the BBC website reads, "...a coroner has raised concerns about the mental health of offenders serving indefinite sentences after a man died." The article goes on to mention how Matthew died, which I am choosing to omit.

IPP sentences are a type of life sentence given out between 2005 and 2012, originally part of Labour's attempts to appear tough on crime in the late 90s and early aughts.

They often had tariffs measured in months or even days.