Two thousand people are still serving a sentence the government says no longer exists.

The story

A reader's letter in today's Metro raises the ongoing crisis around Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences, the open-ended terms handed out between 2005 and 2012 to prisoners deemed dangerous. IPP sentences were abolished for new cases in 2012, but the change was not made retrospective. More than 2,000 people remain in prison under sentences with no fixed release date, some of them originally jailed for offences that would today carry a sentence of only a few years. The United Nations has labelled the sentences "inhumane." The letter argues that releasing these prisoners, rather than freeing others early to relieve overcrowding, is the more defensible route out of the current prison crisis.

The reframe

Abolished is a strong word. It suggests something has ended, that a mechanism has been dismantled and no longer operates. For anyone reading the headline that IPP sentences were abolished in 2012, it would be reasonable to assume the sentence itself had stopped existing.

It did not. It stopped being handed out to new prisoners. Everyone already serving one stayed exactly where they were, under exactly the same open-ended terms, with no guaranteed date on which the sentence would end. The word did the work of closure. The mechanism kept running underneath it.

The account of symbolic politics in this book describes precisely this kind of gap, the moment when language announces a change that the underlying system has not actually delivered:

The words remain the same. The credibility attached to them does not.

"Abolished" is the word. It has not changed since 2012. What has changed is what happens when someone checks it against the more than 2,000 people still inside a sentence that word claims no longer exists. The reform addressed the flow of new cases into the system. It left the stock of existing cases untouched, and for those already inside it, the announcement changed nothing at all about their circumstances.

The cumulative effect of symbolic politics is not outrage. It is exhaustion. People rarely abandon trust overnight. More often they gradually stop investing in it.

Thirteen years is long enough for that exhaustion to be the normal condition rather than a reaction. The letter in today's Metro is not written in outrage. It is written in the flat register of someone restating a fact that has been available and unaddressed for over a decade, and which will most likely still be available and unaddressed next year.

This is not a claim that abolishing IPP sentences for new cases was the wrong decision, or that retrospective release is straightforward. Resentencing thousands of prisoners, some convicted of serious offences, raises real questions the government has been reluctant to resolve. But reluctance to resolve a hard problem and a genuine end to a sentencing regime are different things, and only one of them is what the word "abolished" promises. Thirteen years on, the gap between the label and the population still living inside the sentence it supposedly ended is the measure of how much of that 2012 announcement was resolution, and how much was language filling the space where resolution should have been.

If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this piece, the Samaritans can be contacted free, any time, on 116 123.