Indeterminate sentences were scrapped in 2012 – but thousands of prisoners are still serving them, often for petty crimes, with no hope of release. Could there now be hope of resentencing?

Tony Woodley is raging at the injustice of it all. Enough is enough, says the Labour peer who has introduced a private member’s bill to resentence prisoners still serving time under imprisonment for public protection (IPP), which was abolished 12 years ago because it was regarded as an affront to decency. Although the sentence was banned, it wasn’t done so retrospectively, which means that almost 3,000 IPP prisoners are still inside, mostly for minor crimes, not knowing when, or if, they will ever be released.

IPP is so horrific, Woodley says, that often people don’t believe him when he tells them about it. “If you said to somebody: ‘You’ve got 16 years in jail for stealing a plant pot’, they’d say: ‘You’re the bloody plant pot for saying that!’ People wouldn’t believe or didn’t want to believe some of the cases we’ve highlighted.”