Hello,
I guess at some point or another you may have wondered whether you could handle a prison sentence.
Locked up. How would you get on?
Top tip: it is very easy to over-simplify the concept of prison and prison sentences.
I clearly remember being shocked, I suppose naively thinking that everyone hated prison, when one man told me:
“Chris, it was this sentence that saved me. It lifted me out of the madness.”
We have worked with people who have served many different types of sentences. Increasingly, over the last few years, we have worked with more people serving life sentences and people who were given an IPP sentence.
Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) was a form of indeterminate sentence introduced in England and Wales by the Criminal Justice Act 2003. It was intended for people considered to pose a significant risk of serious harm, where the offence did not justify a life sentence. Although IPP sentences were abolished for new cases in 2012, many people who received them remain subject to them.
People given an IPP sentence were given a minimum period, or tariff, that they had to serve before they could be considered for release. But completing that tariff did not mean automatic release. They could only be released once the Parole Board was satisfied that they no longer posed a significant risk to the public.
That can be very difficult.
It so often removes hope. People can spend years languishing inside, not knowing when, or if, they will be released. The people we see at LandWorks can be broken by their experience of custody.
They do not talk about being saved by their sentence.
IPP can be brutal.
(Significantly, the new Prime Minister has said no one will still be subject to this brutality by the end of the current Parliament.)
And yet, in complete contrast, this week a young man serving a 12-month sentence explained to me that, for him, early release had been a setback.
He felt that he had been put back into the madness too quickly. His life started spinning again and, within three weeks, he was recalled.
So, what are we actually doing when we sentence someone to prison?
For some, prison is simply a period of punishment and disruption. For others, it can mean further chaos moving them further away from a crime-free life.
But for a significant number – surprisingly – the structure and enforced separation from their previous lives can create an opportunity to stop, reflect and begin to change.
I have no doubt that our prisons could and should be reformed to be much better at removing people from the madness and preparing for life on release.
But perhaps this is the point.
We cannot assume that everyone needs the same thing simply because they have been given the same sentence.
That is something we have learned repeatedly at LandWorks:
Every life experience is different.
And if you start from that understanding, you can start to get somewhere.
Chris
1st October 2026