The IPP Action Plan, Personality Disorder Frameworks, and the Reed Report: Parallels in Indefinite Control.
Introduction
The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence has become one of the most serious
justice failures in modern Britain.
Although abolished in 2012, it continues to hold thousands of people in indefinite punishment, either inside prison or under life-long licence in the community.
The government's IPP Action Plan, first introduced in 2016 and updated in 2023, was meant to provide
"pathways to release." Yet in reality, it extends the very logic that created the crisis a system built on fictional risk, bureaucratic delay, and psychological control.
IPP Action Plan 24-25 report in link below:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hmpps-annual-report-on-the-ipp-sentence-2024-to-25
At the same time, the growing use of personality disorder (PD) frameworks within prisons particularly through the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway has created another layer of indefinite containment, often under the language of "treatment" or "risk management."
Offender personality disorder pathway program in link below:
These two regimes, though framed differently, mirror each other in structure and logic. And when we look back to the Reed Report (1992) a landmark review of services for mentally disordered offenders we see that the same warnings were sounded more than thirty years ago.
The state's response to distress, trauma, and social marginalisation remains one of custody over care, control over justice.
1. The IPP Action Plan:
Bureaucratising Hope
The IPP Action Plan promises to help people "progress" toward release.
But the mechanisms it relies on psychological reports, "progression courses," and "risk management" boards often entrench delay and self-blame rather than offering a route out.
Release depends on proving
"reduced risk," a subjective and shifting standard.
Progress is measured through compliance and conformity, not rehabilitation.
Failures in assessment, resources, and treatment access are reframed as individual deficits.
There is no independent accountability for professional error or misuse of power.
In short, the Action Plan presents administrative activity as progress while keeping IPPs trapped in a system of endless evaluation.
"The Action Plan does not end indeterminacy it bureaucratises it."
Personality Disorder Frameworks:
Pathology as Control
Under the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) pathway, thousands of prisoners have been labelled with personality disorders often on the basis of limited or speculative assessment. While presented as therapeutic, the PD framework functions as a technology of containment.
Trauma and institutional damage are reframed as pathology.
Non-compliance or distress is treated as symptom, not protest.
Engagement in treatment becomes a condition for release, blurring therapy and punishment.
The diagnostic label of PD can follow individuals indefinitely, even post-release, sustaining stigma and surveillance.
Rather than care, PD frameworks often produce what survivors describe as coercive therapy a
system that demands self-correction under threat of continued detention.
The Reed Report: A Warning Ignored
In 1992, the Reed Report (Department of Health & Home Office) examined how "mentally disordered offenders" were managed in Britain. It warned of three dangers:
1. The conflation of treatment and punishment.
The fragmentation of responsibility between health, justice, and social care.
The indefinite detention of vulnerable people due to lack of pathways or oversight.
The report called for community based care, transparency, and clear time limits. Yet three decades later, the same structural problems have re-emerged under the banner of risk management this time through the IPP Action Plan and PD frameworks.
IPP Action Plan
Personality Disorder Framework
Reed Report Warning
Across three eras of penal and psychiatric policy the IPP Action Plan, the Personality Disorder (PD) framework, and the Reed Report
(1992) we find the same underlying dynamic: indefinite control disguised as care or rehabilitation.
Each claims to serve public protection or treatment, yet all three entrench a cycle of containment that blames the individual while concealing systemic harm.
Core Logic
IPP Action Plan: Founded on indefinite risk management. Risk is never resolved, only managed, meaning the sentence can never truly end.
Personality Disorder Framework: Built on indefinite treatment of "disorder."
The goal is not recovery but lifelong compliance with therapeutic expectations.
Reed Report Warning: Decades earlier, the Reed Review exposed the same pattern for mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) individuals detained indefinitely not for clinical need, but due to institutional fear of risk.
Each model transforms uncertainty into permanent captivity.
Mechanism of Control
IPP Action Plan: Control operates through behavioural monitoring and parole compliance. Prisoners must continually perform "progress" to earn release an endless test with moving goalposts.
Personality Disorder Framework:
Dominated by diagnostic labelling and therapy compliance. The diagnosis itself becomes a life sentence: refusal to engage proves
"untreatability."
Reed Report Warning: Identified how custody was framed as care, with people held in hospitals or prisons under the guise of protection, long after any therapeutic justification had passed.
In all three systems, control hides beneath the language of help.
IPP Action Plan: Produces endless delay, hopelessness, and re-traumatisation. Many remain detained years past tariff, trapped in bureaucratic loops.
Personality Disorder Framework:
Generates stigma, coercive therapy, and loss of agency. Emotional responses to incarceration are reinterpreted as symptoms.
Reed Report Warning: Documented institutionalisation, neglect, and harm the same psychological destruction now visible among IPP prisoners.
Across all three frameworks, despair is repackaged as "progress."
Responsibility
IPP Action Plan: Places the onus on the prisoner to prove safety.
Structural failings delays, lack of courses, parole backlog are reframed as personal failure.
Personalitu Disorder Framework: Demands that the patientdemonstrate treatability. Resistance becomes pathology, closing every exit.
Reed Report Warning: Showed how responsibility was shifted to the individual, not the system.
Institutional gaps and policy failures were recast as defects in the person.
Each framework absolves the institution by pathologising the individual.
Whether through sentence planning, psychiatric labelling, or "public protection," these regimes all share a self-perpetuating logic of indefinite control.
They claim to manage risk or deliver rehabilitation, yet they function as systems of perpetual containment, built on suspicion rather than justice.
The result: a closed circuit of harm where the state's failure is redefined as the individual's fault.
Until this logic is dismantled, there can be no genuine progress only the endless rebranding of captivity as care.