IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences are back in the spotlight following the high-profile case of Joe Outlaw, who used the psychological harm from this long-abolished punishment in court to defend his rooftop jail protest.

Outlaw, who’s served almost a decade over the four-and-a-half-year minimum term he received for robbing a takeaway with an imitation firearm, had previously staged a sit-in on top of different prison, writing “FREE IPPZ” in paint.

He was acquitted this month of 12 counts of criminal damage, but convicted on two more. Although the judge accepted IPP “undoubtedly affected both your mental and psychological health” and highlighted Outlaw’s “sense of complete hopelessness as a result of the indeterminate nature of your sentence,” he still handed down a three-year sentence for causing “colossal” damage.

Parliament continues to debate IPP sentences 13 years after abolishing them — but not retrospectively, leaving thousands of prisoners trapped in limbo.

Former Unite leader Lord Woodley has tabled the Imprisonment for Public Protection (Re-sentencing) Bill, which enacts the justice committee’s proposed mass resentencing exercise for everyone still serving an IPP — converting discredited indefinite sentences into normal ones with an end date.

The government and its predecessors have opposed resentencing due to fears that some released prisoners might reoffend. But that’s the case with all released prisoners — and it’s blatantly unfair to keep punishing the many because of the future crimes of the few.

This argument was made by Conservative Lord Garnier at the Bill’s committee stage last month.

“Yes, we would be facing the risk,” the former solicitor general conceded, by releasing IPP prisoners, “that we face every time a prisoner on a determinate sentence is released — they might reoffend or do something antisocial or disobliging. But that is life.

“What is not life is to imprison these people in a state of utter hopelessness. We do not run a gulag system — we run a justice system.”

At committee, Peers debated two groups of amendments — six probing the government’s position in detail and six seeking to improve the Bill directly. Mental health was a running theme.

Woodley pointed out IPP “is as big a scandal as the Post Office and the infected blood scandal, as bad as they are. Almost 100 prisoners have taken their own lives, and hundreds more are being driven to insanity by this no-hope, never-ending sentence.”

Addressing IPP prisoners directly, he pleaded: “Do not give up hope” and highlighted the numerous parliamentarians “who will not rest until we have justice for everyone suffering these appalling torture sentences — but please understand that it is the government who ultimately have the power to end this injustice.”

Regretting his Bill “by itself will not bring you justice,” he insisted: “It can help to build pressure on the government to do the right thing and to build public awareness of this industrial-scale miscarriage of justice. Please, do not have false hope about this Bill. Have hope, but not false hope.”

Ten other backbenchers contributed, including Lib Dem Lady Ludford, who called IPPs “an injustice amounting to torture,” and crossbencher Lord Hastings, who accused ministers of “perpetuating a gross, unacceptable injustice and acts of torture that are destroying individuals’ lives and sending them to suicide and desecration, and which are a gross stain on what we call justice or anything to do with it.”

Much of the debate centred around Lady Fox’s amendment “giving the resentencing court the power to continue incarceration if someone still presents a risk to the public as, due to mental disorder, they may be dangerous.”

She explained: “This would, in effect, replace an IPP sentence with a secure hospital order, and would be a backstop safeguard for the government to use in dealing with one difficult group of IPP-ers.”

Former Labour MEP turned Tory Peer, Lord Balfe, also accepted that “some of the people who are detained for public protection probably should not be let out, but that decision should be made by a tribunal or group of people who can judge the mental state of the people in prison for public protection.”

And he was clear and direct that “somehow ministers have to get hold of the Civil Service and say: ‘This is a blot on the British record for human rights’.”

As the debate moved to the front benches, shadow and former minister Lord Wolfson stuck to the Conservative line of opposing resentencing in all forms, but admitted IPPs were “a miscarriage of justice — and we are dealing here with an injustice.”

Adding that “the mental health aspect of the IPP issue is very real,” Wolfson warned: “There will be prisoners who have developed mental health problems while in prison, and indeed because of the sentence itself” — something he described as “a stain on the British state.”

But claiming, on behalf of the government, that “we have a plan and it is working,” Minister Lord Timpson rejected Fox’s backstop amendment, insisting it “would remove the IPP sentence irrespective of the Parole Board’s assessment of an individual’s risk” and “the individual could be released by a mental health review tribunal. This process may not fully consider the risk posed to victims and the public.”

Intervening, Fox challenged the minister’s belief that “the Parole Board are the only people who can assess whether the behaviour is dangerous,” asking: “Would it not be better for a clinical assessment [because medical professionals] are in a much stronger position, surely, than the Parole Board, which does not necessarily understand mental ill health?”

In response, Timpson could only claim: “The Parole Board has the right skills and experience to make these often very difficult and complex decisions.”

But with the courts now recognising IPP’s unique harm, they join the United Nations, whose special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, wrote to Peers ahead of the debate backing the backstop amendment and warning of the “unlawful psychological torture” caused by this sentence.

Will ministers now finally give in to growing pressure and change the law, or is it instead time for judicial review — dragging the government itself through the courts to close the IPP gulags for good and wipe away, once and for all, this shameful stain on the British state?