Assignment task: '...the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, the Blair government, with astonishing recklessness, created a new sort of sentence that is on course to destabilise the running of prisons, to breach the capacity of the whole system and even to rebuild the miseries of the old system of asylums for people suffering mental illness but this time within the bleakness of our prisons'. (Indefinitely Maybe? A Prison Reform Trust briefing. 16 Dec 2005)
Discuss with examples the impact of policy on sentencing.
You will need to refer to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and sentencing guidelines in your essay.
In your essay, you should include:
- What is an IPP sentence? And what is the difference between an IPP and a life sentence?
- What is an extended sentence? And who might be in line for those types of sentences?
- The indeterminate sentence's effect on the prison population
- Vulnerability and risk for IPP prisoners
- Proposals for reform
- You should reference your sources in-text and provide a bibliography in the Harvard style.