I agree. Like you, I deplore what Bamber has done, but unless somebody is actually a present danger, it is wrong to keep somebody inside a close confinement prison for longer than is necessary, and do to so for their natural life is inhumane.
Personally I think it was wrong to abolish the death penalty; doing so has given us these dilemmas when dealing with the worst offenders. I think if you're going to keep somebody alive, then you have to accept that they will want to pursue some degree of rehabilitation and to deny this is degrading and shockingly cruel - in all cases. Even in the case of somebody like Ian Brady, my view would have been that if we don't have the moral fortitude to hang him, then we have to accept that he will one day either be released altogether or down-categorised to an open prison. Just keeping somebody locked up for no reason other than vengeance is stupid.
The history of whole life orders, and their precursors, whole life tariffs, is dubious. Some background:
Whole life tariffs came into being in 1988 as secret directives to parole boards and prisons, normally issued from ministerial level. They were not called 'whole life tariffs', as such, initially, but the understanding was that, barring a change in circumstances, the offender would be expected to serve a natural life term.
In Bamber's case, the tariff was issued in the late 1980s, very early in his sentence, by the then-Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. This was done in total secrecy, even Bamber was not informed. The tariff would only have become significant to Bamber at around the 20 year point of his sentence, when he would be considered for a resettlement prison and would have found himself denied this re-categorisation without explanation.
What intervened was a legal challenge brought in the 1990s, I think by Myra Hindley, against her unofficial natural life term. She realised that when she completed her tariff in 1996, she would be denied progress through the system and figured out that she was being kept inside on purpose.
As a result of the Hindley case, natural life terms were upheld but the practice changed so that the Home Secretary (then in charge of the justice function) had to inform all prisoners subject to these 'secret'/unofficial natural life terms, which officially became whole life tariffs, and Bamber was notified in about 1994 by the then-Home Secretary, Michael Howard.
However, at this stage a whole life tariff was not unequivocally a natural life sentence. Bingham J. in the Hindley case made it clear that the Home Secretary's power was subject to a right of the prisoner to progress to release where it could be shown that exceptional progress was made.
The big regressive change came in 2002/2003, when the Blair government introduced whole life orders under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The 2003 Act took away the system of discretionary whole life tariffs that had arisen with the Bingham judgment in Hindley.
There have been a series of legal challenges since, including involving by Bamber himself, that have chipped away at the 2003 regime, to the point now that all whole life orders must be reviewed during sentence.
