This is The Guardian.

Hi, my name's David Wolf and I'm the editor of The Guardian Long Read.

In the final few weeks of the year, we're looking back on some of our favourite pieces of 2024

and giving you a little insight into why we've chosen them and the story behind these stories.

So for today's piece, I've chosen one titled,

As a teenager, John was jailed for assaulting someone and stealing their bike.

That was 17 years ago, will he ever be released by Sophie Atkinson.

This piece by Sophie Atkinson is really an outstanding piece of journalism, but I should say

straight away that it's one of the bleakest and most shocking pieces we've ever published.

It's about what are known as IPP sentences, which were introduced in Britain in 2003.

IPP stands for imprisonment for public protection.

Sophie's piece explains the genesis of the legislation very skillfully, but in short,

these sentences apply the structure of a life sentence, a minimum term after which the prisoner is eligible

for parole, to a massively expanded number of crimes, many of them not particularly serious.

The result was that thousands of prisoners who would previously have been convicted for a short

amount of time and then released now found themselves indefinitely detained until they could convince

a parole board they posed no threat of reoffending. The idea seems immediately unjust since

it's punishing people for crimes they haven't yet committed, but maybe in particularly

extreme cases the logic behind such sentences is at least clear.

What's particularly shocking about the way these IPP sentences were implemented, however, is that it was applied to so many cases.

It was thought when it was initially introduced that it would be a few hundred offenders, and by the time these sentences were abolished in 2012,

it was actually more than 6,000.

...