The head of the Parole Board has expressed alarm at the soaring number of indeterminate sentences being handed out to dangerous offenders by judges.

He said that within four years the number of criminals in jails in England and Wales with never-ending sentences was expected to reach 12,500. Add in the growing life-sentence population and the total number of prisoners in jail for “life” by 2011 could be almost 20,000.

Sir Duncan Nichol, the board chairman, said: “The global impact of indeterminate sentences for public protection will be that prison overcrowding will increase and places on offending behaviour courses will be scarce.”

The indeterminate sentence came into force in April 2005 and is intended for offenders assessed as dangerous and who have been convicted of a crime from a list of 153 that includes wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, assault to resist arrest, riot, violent disorder and some sex crimes, including exposure.

A person given the sentence is told that they must serve a minimum jail term before being considered for release by the board. They remain in jail until the board allows them to be released. Almost 1,900 of the sentences have been handed down but many offenders are being told that they will serve minimum terms of less than two years before being considered for release.

Among those given the new sentence was Craig Sweeney, a paedophile, who was told that he would serve five years and 108 days before being eligible for parole. That minimum term created a furore and was criticised by John Reid, the Home Secretary, even though the judge had applied the law correctly and had said it was unlikely that Sweeney would be released on becoming eligible.

But hundreds of other offenders are being given even shorter minimum terms, Sir Duncan has disclosed. He said that such short minimum terms meant that neither the Prison Service nor the board could carry out proper risk assessments.

He is understood to be critical, in private, of some judges for handing out the sentence too frequently.

Sir Duncan said, in a lecture to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, sponsored by The Times, that recently half those offenders given the sentence had received a minimum term of 20 months or less. A further 20 per cent had been given an 18-month minimum term. Sir Duncan said that this meant that offenders were entitled to be considered for release almost as soon as they were jailed. Prisons had no time to assess them.

He added: “The board must make up its own mind [on whether to release] regardless of what the judge said but, in practice, there is little to go on. Hence an enormous amount of resources are expended on what can sometimes appear to be a futile exercise.”

Richard Garside, the director of the centre, said: “If prison numbers are to be reduced the focus must move to challenging the ill-thought-out policy of locking up thousands of people for indeterminate periods rather than simply trying to divert those who are sent to prison for a matter of months away from custody.”

Behind bars

78,888
prison population

6,355
life-sentence prisoners

1,897
indeterminate sentence prisoners

35
prisoners who will die in jail

212 years
median minimum term for indeterminate sentence in 2005

Source: Prison Service / Home Office

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