The final, desperate days of a prisoner left to rot on IPP

Days before Taylor Atkinson took his own life, he told his partner exactly what he was going to do. Using information he had found in a science textbook from the prison library, he planned to inflict a catastrophic injury on himself, telling the woman whom he called his soulmate that he was leaving prison “in a body bag” that weekend.

- Amy-Clare Martin

After 13 years trapped in prison on an outlawed indefinite jail term, he had served almost nine years longer than his original three-year, 265-day punishment for aggravated burglary. But under the terms of his imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence, he was repeatedly denied his freedom - at times because the despair of not having a release date had left his mental health on a knife edge.

The only glimpse of the outside world he had seen - a series of day releases in the months before his death - had been snatched away weeks earlier after a prison officer had briefly lost sight of him in a busy shopping centre.

“He had a plan and I knew for a fact it was going to happen,” his partner Sam Faulder, a fellow prisoner, said of their final conversation. She begged prison officers to place Taylor, a 50-year-old transgender prisoner, on constant watch, or allow her to share a cell with him, but “no one listened”.

“I couldn’t understand it,” she added. “I am not someone that talks to officers. I was crying and begging ... no one was listening. I couldn’t understand, still don’t understand.”

Three days later, Taylor bled to death in his cell at HMP Eastwood Park, a struggling women’s prison in south Gloucestershire. Although he identified as a man, he believed he was the last IPP prisoner in the women’s estate never to have been released.

This week, an inquest jury recorded Taylor’s death as a suicide and concluded that the IPP sentence was “likely the most significant factor contributing to the feelings of despair and mental exhaustion that led to his actions” on 9 July 2022. They also found that, if Taylor had been under constant supervision, it might have saved his life. ‘

Why didn’t they give him a chance?’