The sister of a man who has spent 12 years behind bars on an abolished prison sentence has pleaded with new justice minister Lord Timpson to intervene in her brother’s high-profile case.
Clara White, whose brother Thomas White has been in prison since 2012 for stealing a mobile phone, said offenders like him who are serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) have “no hope”.
In a letter to Lord Timpson, seen by Sky News, Ms White asked the new prisons minister to help move her brother to a private NHS hospital to deal with the hallucinations he suffers from as a result of the sentence he is serving.
She said her brother had been moved to 12 different prisons over the course of his sentence, which has no release date, and due to this has “no way of demonstrating that he can be released”.
“In the years gone by I’ve watched my brother lose pieces of his mind,” she wrote.
“Thousands of others have not been given something so simple such as hope.”
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What is an IPP sentence?
Thomas White, now 40, was one of more than 8,000 offenders who were given an IPP sentence, which the courts could impose from 2005 until they were abolished in 2012.
The sentence – which has been described as a form of “psychological torture” by human rights experts – was intended for serious violent and sexual offenders who posed a significant risk of serious harm to the public but whose crimes did not warrant a life term.
Although the government’s stated aim was public protection, concerns quickly grew that IPP sentences were being applied too…
