An RAF veteran whose brother is languishing behind bars during an indeterminate prison sentence that has seen at least 90 prisoners end their lives says it is “extremely urgent” that he be resentenced and released.

Rob Russell was sentenced in 2009 to an IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentence with a two-and-a-half-year minimum charge for threatening to kill.

He remains in prison today after serving six times the length of his original tariff – and five years more than the maximum determinable sentence available for the offence.

The IPP sentence was abolished in 2012 amid growing concern about the psychological impact on prisoners. But the abolition was not retrospective, leaving nearly 3,000 prisoners trapped in the system with no end in sight.

About 700 of these are 10 or more years past their original term.

They include Wayne Bell, who was jailed at the age of 17 for an assault while trying to steal a bike and has now spent 17 years behind bars, Aaron Graham, who was given an IPP in 2005 for a GBH charge and will have spent 19 year. years in prison in December this year, as well as Rob.

Speaking to Metro, Rob’s brother Roddy Russell said the sentence has had such a devastating effect on his younger sibling’s mental health that he has tried to end his life “on at least two occasions” and once “asked another inmate to strangle him”.

“Go ahead and do your two and a half years and you’ll get out”

For the past 15 years, Roddy has become his brother’s handler, campaigning tirelessly for his brother’s release so he can return to the Forest of Dean, where they both grew up.

The West Country region was where Roddy began his dream career in the Royal Air Force, but also where Rob’s nightmare began.

At the time of his arrest, Rob had become addicted to alcohol following the breakdown of his marriage and had also lost his job.

“I knew nothing about the criminal justice system at all because we had never come into contact with it,” Roddy said.

“I believed at the time that, ‘OK, you messed up’ and I trusted the criminal justice system to deliver justice.

“So I just let the system kick in and do what I thought the system would do and deliver justice. I thought, go ahead and do your two and a half years and you’ll get out.

Rob “did anything and everything the prison could offer him in terms of rehabilitation,” says Roddy, but his removal from a behavioral course for being “disruptive” proved a major stumbling block.

“It all happened around his two-and-a-half-year term so of course the Parole Board didn’t make an order for him to be released,” Roddy said.

‘It was about that point that he seemed to give up trying completely, because he had tried so hard and two and a half years had just passed him by.

“I didn’t recognize my own brother”

“That was also the point where I thought there was something a little weird going on here (with the sentence). Then he just declined.

He became withdrawn, did not take care of his own health and ended up attempting suicide on at least two occasions. He asked another prisoner to strangle him.

“Then he just went into this completely disengaged catatonic state.”

The prison eventually contacted Roddy and invited him to come and visit his brother because staff were so concerned.

“It was the first time I was in a prison,” he recalls. “I looked around the visiting hall and I couldn’t see anyone who looked like my brother.

‘I said, “Sorry, I can’t see him”, so they pointed him out to me. I walked up to the desk and he looked so uneven.

“He’d lost weight. His hair was all matted and greasy and unkempt. He’d grown a beard with horrible bits in it.

“He was upset, his eyes were darting all over the place. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He couldn’t talk to me properly.

‘He looked like the pictures you see in the Bible of Jesus nailed to the cross.

‘I thought it was quite difficult. I didn’t recognize my own brother.

‘This is what that IPP ruling has done to him’

The ensuing years have followed a pattern of prison sentence hearings dealing with alleged breaches, failed parole hearings and deepening mental health issues.

“When he got to about the 10-year mark, he talked about murderers, rapists and pedophiles going to prison after him and getting out while he’s still in prison,” Roddy said.

“He’s at the stage now where he won’t even commit to parole – he’s just not turning up for parole.

“When I visited him recently he came up to the visitors’ hall and he brought with him like a little A5 booklet of religious prayers. And this is really worrying me now because he has progressed to another stage of mental illness that requires assessment and diagnosis and treatment.

‘He now believes he is a follower of Jesus and he must stay at HMP Swaleside because God has placed him there to shine a light on the darkness that is there.

“(He believes) that he must shine this light over the darkness to expose all the perpetrators at HMP Swaleside and bring them to account for their misdeeds.

“He was never like that before he went to prison. This is what that IPP sentence has done to him.’

At least 90 IPP prisoners have ended their lives

Roddy continued: “I think a lot of IPP prisoners are like Rob and they do this to try and make sense of the ridiculous amount of time they’ve been incarcerated because it doesn’t make sense to them.

“The judge gives you a two and a half year sentence so therefore I should really be released at or just after the two and a half year sentence.

“So, those who have never ever been released after 10, 15 years have to try to get some kind of sense of how they ended up in prison for so long.”

According to recent government data, 90 IPP prisoners have committed suicide in prison since 2005.

Last year alone there were nine self-inflicted deaths among IPP prisoners – the highest number in a single year since the sentence was introduced, according to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO).

Professor Graham Towl, former chief psychologist at the Ministry of Justice and professor of forensic psychology at Durham University, told Metro prisoners serving indeterminate sentences are at greater risk of taking their own lives.

“The patterns of timing of such deaths may be different for ascertaining sentenced prisoners where the period of very highest levels of risk is in the first days of incarceration,” he said.

“With indeterminately sentenced prisoners, the periods of increased risk of suicidal death appear to be associated with the periods of regular case review.

“The IPP verdict is widely discredited – it seems to me to be an example of an unfair verdict.”

“It’s a problem created by politicians – they have to come up with a solution”

That view is shared by Lord Blunkett, the man who first introduced the ruling when he served as home secretary in the New Labor government in 2005.

He has called the IPP ruling his “biggest regret” and is now backing a private members’ bill introduced in the House of Lords earlier this month which aims to provide a framework for prosecuting individuals still serving them.

The issue is all the more pressing as the government activates emergency measures to release hundreds of prisoners to free up space after the prison population hit a record.

“It’s almost like it’s a sick dark joke,” Roddy said of the temporary early release schedule. “I would laugh about it if it wasn’t so serious and it didn’t affect me the way it does.”

Experts say a prosecution campaign could cut prison overcrowding by a third and free the equivalent population of four medium-sized UK prisons.

Richard Garside, director of the Center for Crime and Justice Studies, said: “Although the Government is sorting out short-term prison capacity, they still face further capacity pressures in the coming years.

“Sentencing all those subject to the IPP sentence will remedy the medium-term prison capacity crisis looming over the Government.

‘Labour, not unreasonably, argues that the immediate, short-term capacity crisis is a legacy of the outgoing Conservative government. But now that Labor is in government, it’s time to act.

“If Labor continues to reject measures such as appealing to those serving an IPP sentence and other creative solutions to the medium-term capacity crisis coming down the road, the resulting mess will be on it alone.”

Roddy continued: ‘When I speak to MPs they all agree that something needs to be done about it, but none of them go ahead and do anything about it.

– It is a problem created by politicians and politicians have come up with a solution.

“There was a cross-party resolution – the resentment – but it seems to lie with the Minister of Justice as an individual.

“It is extremely urgent that they go ahead and do the damning because they have blood on their hands already with these deaths – over 90 deaths by suicide in the prison.

“And we have found at least 10 deaths outside of licensees who can no longer cope with the IPP sentence hanging over them and the threat of revocation.”

Speaking in July after the government announced plans to reduce the IPP license period from 10 years to three, Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood said: “I want to make progress towards a safe and sustainable release for those serving IPP sentences, but not on a ways that affect the protection of the public.