In England and Wales, whole-life imprisonment is the harshest sanction available to the courts, emerging in the decades after the abolition of the death penalty. The whole-life order requires people to spend their whole lives in prison with no prospect of release, except on exceptional compassionate grounds.

From 1988, whole-life sentences (called “whole-life tariffs”) could be imposed by the home secretary and were used for handful of criminals. However, a number of legal challenges in the 1990s chipped away at the home secretary’s power to do so. In 2003, the Criminal Justice Act formally introduced whole-life orders, giving judges the power to impose them.

The European Court of Human Rights initially ruled in 2013 in response to a challenge from three people serving whole-life tariffs that these sentences breached human rights law, as they constituted inhuman and degrading treatment. A later ruling in 2017 found that the compassionate release clause (part of the 1997 Crime Act) keeps the order lawful. However, notably, no one has ever been released under it.

This punishment represents the state’s most severe power to harm its citizens. Understanding how and why it is used tells us about our appetite for punishment and the state’s power to inflict it. And evidence suggests that its use is rising.

Historically, data on whole-life orders has been difficult to come by. The Ministry of Justice has not reliably published figures on how many people are given these sentences, nor how many are serving them at a given time. Online lists of names, we have found, are inaccurate.

This is where our recent paper, published in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice in October 2025, comes in.

We sought to understand how whole-life orders have been used since their introduction in 2003. We started by generating what we believe to be the most accurate dataset on the use of whole-life sentencing through a combination of Freedom of Information requests to the Ministry of Justice, as well as in-depth archival research drawing on court transcripts, media reports and parliamentary debates.

In analysing this dataset, we found that there are currently 74 people serving whole-life sentences. The year with the highest number of whole-life orders given was 2023, when Lucy Letby received 15 for her crimes.

Notably, 74% of all whole-life sentences imposed since 1965 were imposed after the Criminal Justice Act in 2003. This suggests that transferring the power of this sentence from the home secretary to the courts created the conditions for it to be used more widely.

Since 2003, the population serving whole-life sentences has risen significantly faster than the prison population as a whole, which has more than doubled since 1990 but remained relatively stable since 2000.

We also found that whole-life orders are being used for a wider range of offences, including those which are not on the specific list of offences for which these sentences can be imposed.

Examples include Wayne Couzens, who was given this sentence for the murder of a single person, and Letby, who received eight whole-life orders for the attempted murder of seven babies (alongside seven others for actual murder). Prior to Couzens, those who received whole-life orders for a single murder had previous convictions for serious offences.

Finally, courts are increasingly imposing more than one whole-life order on individual people. Before 2022, the maximum number of orders imposed on one person was two. Since then, Damien Bendall was given five whole-life orders for four counts of murder and rape, and Letby received 15.

In 2025, Kyle Clifford received three whole-life orders for the murders of Louise, Hannah and Carol Hunt. In most cases, this reflects the seriousness of the offending and the number of victims. It also makes appeals increasingly difficult.

Penal populism

This is not to suggest that we should not be using whole-life orders – clearly these people have caused significant harm to victims, the public and, in some cases, trust in public institutions such as the police and the NHS. But these trends raise an important question: why is this severe punishment becoming more common?

The answer doesn’t lie in a rise in the most serious offences such as homicide, which have remained stable or even declined over the last few decades. Rather, we would point to what criminologists call penal populism: the tendency of politicians to respond to perceived public opinion by introducing tougher sentences.

Over the last half a century, a series of legislative changes have led to sentence lengths significantly increasing, particularly for serious offences. This is especially relevant given recent proposals to make whole-life orders mandatory for certain crimes.

Read more: How a doubling of sentence lengths helped pack England's prisons to the rafters

We are also concerned about the lack of data publicly available on this topic, which makes it difficult for the government to be held to account, and raises further questions: if the whole-life order is only compliant with human rights legislation because of the possibility of release on compassionate grounds, should we not expect someone to have been released via this mechanism? And if no one has, what does that say about how human rights protections work in practice?

Human rights aside, the cost of imprisoning people on whole-life orders far exceeds that of people who are released, especially as they age and need increasing levels of care and medical treatment. And when we consider the constant problems of overcrowding in the prison system, these pressures become even more paramount.

If we are willing to accept ever-harsher punishment via sentences which do not allow for redemption or rehabilitation, then the rise of the whole-life order may seem justified. People who cause high levels of harm do – perhaps rightly – elicit anger and revulsion.

At the same time, evidence suggests that people believe in rehabilitation as an important purpose of punishment. We argue, therefore, that we need to look more closely at how and why the state is choosing to exercise its most extreme power to punish in increasing numbers of cases.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jake Phillips, University of Cambridge and Hannah Gilman, Arden University

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Nothing to disclose

Jake Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.