Behind bars for 99 years – the petty criminals locked up with no sign of release

Clara White hasn’t heard her little brother Thomas sing in years.

Her memories of the ‘kind, loving and musical’ little boy have been replaced by a barefoot, dishevelled man wearing his bedsheets as robes and claiming to be Jesus Christ. 

Thomas, 40, has been experiencing psychosis as a result of paranoid schizophrenia caused by a 12-year-and-counting prison sentence after he stole a phone in Manchester in 2012.

It’s an incredibly lengthy jail-time given the crime in question, but Thomas has tragically fallen through the cracks due to an Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence – also known as 99-year sentences because of how long they can last. 

Introduced nearly 20 years ago, IPPs could be applied to up to 153 crimes, including affray and criminal damage. They were handed down to 8,711 people, many of them under 18, before being abolished in 2012 after the European Court of Human Rights intervened. 

However, 2,796 prisoners remain detained indefinitely today, including Thomas White.

Growing up in Manchester with his three siblings, Thomas became involved in petty crime and theft at a young age, but he was never a violent offender, his sister Clara insists. 

Describing the crime that saw him locked up, she says: ‘He was drunk and chatting to two American missionaries. They were talking; he hugged one and kissed the other one on the head, took the phone and ended up with a charge of street robbery.

‘He had minor convictions. Nothing to warrant this sentence. He’s not a murderer or rapist. What he did was wrong. Has he paid his debt to society? Yes. Mentally and physically. He’ll never be the same. He’s not the brother that I knew.’

Thomas is now heavily sedated and spends 23 hours a day in segregation. He has just been transferred to another prison – for the 17th time in 12 years, and is now 600-miles away from his family.

Clara, 42, worries that Thomas is a danger to himself. He won’t speak to the press; he doesn’t see the point. He’s been pushed from pillar to post, spending the last ten years in 16 different prisons around the country, as his mental health deteriorated to the point where ‘he started to display the most serious mental health issues I’ve ever witnessed,’ she says.

When Thomas was moved from Norwich to Garth Prison four years ago, Clara was shocked by his appearance. He was wearing too-small shoes with no socks, grubby clothes, his hair was unkempt and he stared at the floor, unable to engage in conversation.

He was thin, the stress having ravaged his body, Clara believes. Chunks of his hair had fallen out and he had one eyebrow missing.

‘He was a very, very ill man,’ she says. ‘Something in my brother’s mind broke in segregation. There is nothing to progress him.’

That last visit four years ago was distressing, so instead, Clara waits for his call every day, worrying when she doesn’t hear from him. Some of the calls have been disturbing; like the time he started talking in Roman numerals, or when other inmates rang to say Thomas was very sick.

Last year, the White family commissioned an independent psychiatrist to assess Thomas. The doctor’s report concluded that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, probably caused by the IPP, and that he should receive support in a psychiatric hospital. 

Clara sent Thomas’ psychiatric report to local MPs and the Minister for Justice, but he still doesn’t have a hospital bed.

‘Most people on IPPs are suffering serious, inhumane and degrading treatment. They are lost; fallen through the net,’ she says. ‘The backlog is so big that they’ve never seen the light of day.

‘The hopelessness of the situation has been the cause of setting Thomas’ mental health off. My brother, to the eyes of everyone involved, isn’t a human. He’s just an email that goes back and forwards.

‘It makes me really angry. A lot of them are very ill and the Government has buried it. It’s a human traffic jam. But this is people’s lives.’

Sadly, there are hundreds of stories like Thomas’. 

42-year-old Martin is still serving a sentence for trying to steal a cigarette in 2006. While Danny, 35, from Newcastle was just 17 when he was jailed for stealing a phone and was only released last year. 

Wayne, had served 18 years after being convicted in 2006 for getting in a fight. He remains behind bars.

However, one of the most disturbing aspects of the 99-year-sentence, is how many people have died in prison, including 90 who have taken their own lives.

Londoner Tommy Nicol killed himself six years into a four-year sentence, having lost faith of ever being free. He had been in and out of prison for stealing cars when he was sentenced with an IPP in May 2009.

Tommy and his sister Donna, 18 months his junior, were best friends growing up; he taught her how to ride a bike, but by the time he was 14 Tommy had fallen in with the wrong crowd and started stealing cars. By age 16 he was serving time in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution.

Tommy, 37, was given a four-year IPP sentence for robbery in 2009 – when he had been out on parole. (Ironically, he had stolen a car so he could get back to his approved premises within curfew, so he wouldn’t be sent back to prison.)

At first, he was ‘as positive as you can be in prison,’ his sister Donna tells Metro.co.uk.

‘He always owned what he did. He acknowledged that he deserved some kind of punishment. He never kind of tried to justify it or downplay it,’ she explains.

‘In the early days, he was just getting on with it. He was trying to be the best that he could be. He never really got into trouble it was always trying to be as engaged as possible. He was always his funny, upbeat self, trying to make people laugh. He was just like that.’

However, when multiple attempts to access the training he needed to be eligible for release failed, it slowly took its toll and Tommy’s mental health started to fail.

One of his forms was refused because it lacked detail (Tommy was dyslexic and didn’t know what to write) and another was lost for a year, meaning he couldn’t apply for parole.

Donna last saw her brother in 2011 in HMP Ryehill, when he was his usual, happy, chatty self. ‘I didn’t have any concerns about his wellbeing at that point,’ she remembers. But like Thomas, his mental health started to deteriorate after being moved around multiple prisons.

By 2015, Tommy had gone on hunger strike, cut his face with a razor blade and set fire to his cell. When he was put in segregation as punishment, he drew a circle in his own blood and sat in it, rocking, with a paper plate on his face as a mask. He should have received a mental health assessment and urgent care; instead he was left alone to end his life.

Donna was living in New York at the time and didn’t know what was going on with her brother, That was, until a week after he’d harmed himself, a police officer knocked on their sister’s door to say Tommy’s life support machine had been switched off after he’d made an attempt on his life.

He’d been alone in hospital for four days before the decision was made.

After he died at HMP The Mount in Hertfordshire, the consultant forensic psychiatrist at his inquest concluded that Tommy’s IPP sentence had contributed to his death ‘more than anything else’ as it made him ‘lose hope’.

Donna, 44, says: ‘It’s appalling. I didn’t realise how terrible the system was. It’s not something you recover from. I’m shocked that it happened and I’m shocked that it continues to happen. 

‘I don’t disagree with justice. There has to be repercussions for things that people do, but that has to be proportionate. Giving people a sentence that results in them killing themselves is appalling.’

Meanwhile prisoners, without an end to their sentences, continue to end their lives. Last year nine people killed themselves while on IPP.

‘The most vulnerable people are being irreparably damaged. It’s like getting rid of the death sentence, but not for those unlucky enough to be sentenced at a particular time,’ adds Donna, who is now a member of campaigning group Ungripp, a grassroots campaigning organisation pushing for changes to the IPP. 

As a result of years of campaigning, in 2022 the Justice Committee concluded that IPP sentences were ‘irredeemably flawed’ and called for a comprehensive re-sentencing programme, with an independent panel appointed to advise on the practical implementation of this process. 

The Government promised to implement change, but last year the Committee found this didn’t go far enough.

Donna, who works in education, says: ‘We are calling for re-sentencing, so that those people who haven’t been released can have their sentences reevaluated, so they can get an end date. People are so damaged by these sentences, they need proper support when they come out.’ 

It is unclear whether these changes will improve Thomas’ situation, but for Clara, he will never be the same. ‘You can see it in his eyes. His spirit is broken, she says sadly.

Twelve years after Thomas drunkenly stole that phone, he still has no idea if he will ever be let out of prison. Alongside his mental health, the sentence has ravaged his family too.

‘We are also regular visitors to despair, like Thomas,’ adds Clara. ‘It’s taken its toll on all of us. It’s almost like we are handcuffed to him. I’ve served every day of that sentence with him.’

Metro has contacted the MoJ for comment.

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