Jails at breaking point - report

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said ministers must take action to deal with the "ferocious and unjust" law behind the sentences.

A report by the Prison Reform Trust reveals how more than 3,000 of the life sentences have been passed, many for relatively minor offences, in just two years.

That number is expected to rise to at least 12,000 by 2012 unless Government ministers take action. Calls for a fresh look at the law, introduced in 2004 by then Home Secretary David Blunkett, have been growing in recent weeks.

Last week Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced an urgent review of the "indeterminate sentence for public protection", sometimes known as IPP. Speaking after visiting Belmarsh Prison, Mr Straw said he was aware of concern from the judiciary, prison staff, officials and prisoners.

IPPs are life sentences with no fixed release date introduced under the Criminal Justice Act for the most dangerous criminals in Britain. Anyone being sentenced to an IPP has to demonstrate that they are no longer a danger to society before they can be released.

Ms Lyon said the Government must take action to remedy the harm caused by IPPs to both the prison system and inmates. She said: "No action is not an option for this review of indeterminate sentences for public protection. They were designed as a technical measure to detain a small number of dangerous offenders.

"But badly drafted, and whipped up by the previous prime minister and home secretary, they have become a ferocious, unjust law that, in two years, has catapulted around 3,000 people into jail for who knows how long.

"This catastrophic change has been wished on the prison service without extra resources, leaving prisons under vast pressure and thousands of men held in overcrowded jails, beyond their tariff, with no means to show that they do not present a risk to the public. This is the Kafkaesque nature of modern day imprisonment."

Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, said the law did not take into account the massive amount of extra resources needed to care for such prisoners. She added: "There was no plan about how the prison system - already overcrowded, already under stress - was going to deal with them."