Nine years ago Johnny McIntyre got into a fight at the White Hart Pub in Wolvercote on the day of his nan’s funeral. Emotions were running high. An argument started inside the pub then outside the fight started. Someone handed Johnny a wooden stick and he hit the other man and left him with a two inch long cut on the head.

He was charged and sentenced for GBH with intent and got a minimum tariff of 18 months before he could apply for parole. The recommended prison term by the judge was three and a half years. Now nine years later next month, Johnny is still in Bullingdon Prison.

How does this happen? The jigsaw has many pieces.

When Johnny was 16 years old, 10 years before the fight, he committed a violent offence and was sent to a juvenile detention centre.

When the schoolgirl Sarah Payne was murdered by Roy Whiting, a convicted paedophile who had been released early from a four year sentence, her mother, Sara, started a campaign to establish an Indeterminate sentence to protect the Public (IPP). Home Secretary David Blunkett supported the new sentence which was introduced by Labour and became law in 2005, intended for the most dangerous violent and sexual offenders who were not eligible for a life sentence.

Oxford Mail:

Sara Payne

Tony Blair’s government predicted that just a few hundred IPP sentences would be necessary each year. Instead thousands were handed out.

Johnny McIntyre in 2005 was in the first wave of those eligible for an IPP. He got one. The essence of this kind of sentence is that prisoners are not considered for release by the Parole Board until they have convinced the Board they pose no risk to the public.

Since 2005 the IPP regime was discredited because it swelled the prison population, put a huge pressure on the already stretched Parole Board, but most importantly many prisons did not provide the courses the prisoners needed to take. The prisoners on IPP were put in a catch 22 situation – they couldn’t prove they were not a risk to the public because they couldn’t take the courses to prove this.

Ex-Justice Secretary Ken Clarke called the IPP sentence a ‘stain’ on the Criminal Justice System. It was scrapped in May 2012, but the law repealing it was not made retrospective; so the prisoners who were caught by it before 2012 are still caught by it. Johnny McIntyre is still trapped in the system.

Oxford Mail:

Ken Clarke

Before he could even apply for parole, he had to wait three and a half years due to an overstretched system and without being able to take any courses. The board required him to take two courses, one for anger management and other for Enhanced Thinking Skills. He got these courses after two years and then sat his second parole hearing at Doncaster prison where the board asked him to do another educational course. Doncaster did not offer it, so he had to apply to another prison that did. It took two years to get moved.

Finally after being in prison for six years he was moved to an open prison at Spring Hill near Oxford. In the courses prisoners are taught to remove themselves from a violent situation. But if the violent threat is in prison, how do they do that? They could go to the prison officers and ask for help, but that help might not be immediate.

Johnny was in danger of being in a fight which would not help on his next parole hearing. He feared for his safety and knew something bad would happen immediately if he did not get out.

His girlfriend Jodie Prin from Rose Hill, who stood by him for the last nine years, said “He knew of another similar case where an inmate chucked boiling water over the head of another prisoner. The officers gave him one paracetamol. He got no help until the next day and during the night the burn continued to eat into his nerves and he lost 50 per cent of movement in his face.

“Johnny was feeling very fearful and rang me to pick him up. I did and after 24 hours I dropped him off near the gates of Bullingdon Prison and that’s how he got out of the open prison at Spring Hill where the danger was.

“He couldn’t trust the prison system to protect him so reluctantly he escaped. Johnny knew he had done wrong. He was ready to accept his punishment, but this wasn’t punishment it was insane.

“It’s an offence to abscond. Therefore he had a judicial review and the governor decided the punishment. With the IPP there is no release date, so it is not possible to extend the sentence. He got a punishment of loss of canteen privileges, loss of earnings and no extra privileges for 28 days. That happened three years ago. He’s now 35. He will have been in prison nine years next month. Half this time is because of delays with the courses, the hearings and the reports.”

What effect is this having on Johnny? According to Jodie: “It’s heart-breaking. He’s trying to be strong for his family and me, but he realises that he’s lost a big chunk of his life. The great difficulty is not knowing if he will get out. There is no end in sight.

What’s the effect on Jodie? “I’m not married to him; we don’t have kids. But I love him. He’s my life. I wanted to have a life that would be more settled at this stage. I wanted to have kids. Every day there is a cloud over my head – ‘When am I going to get him out?’ I’m intelligent and I’m not standing by a thug.”

According to John Padmore, former governor of HMP Brixton, “We’re locking them up not for what they’ve done, but for what they might do in the future. There are 6,107 prisoners serving IPP in England and Wales. Prisoners serving those sentences have no idea when they will be released and over half of these prisoners have gone over their tariff date. What you don’t do is give a large number of prisoners a reason to hate the system. There’s nothing for them, so they’ve got nothing to lose.”

Who are the losers in all this?

Wayne was convicted of a number of minor alcohol-related offences, including shoplifting and bar brawls. He was arrested for GBH and given a twenty month IPP sentence. He was released after serving twice that time. This is his view. “It costs around £40,000 to keep a prisoner locked up for 12 months. No wonder the country is broke when the government keeps people incarcerated years beyond their release date, especially when, for people with addictions like me, six months in rehab can be the answer.”

So far it has cost you and me over £340,000 to keep Johnny McIntyre in prison almost three times as long as the judge recommended. Are we the winners or the losers? And by the way, what about Johnny?