UK prisons continue to release people by accident, but that’s only part of the problem
LONDON — It has been a strange kind of prison break: no daring escapes, no Hollywood escapades – just inmates quietly released, by mistake, onto the streets of Britain.
What could have been an isolated mistake comes at an unwelcome time in a country strained by rising prices, stagnant wages and the collapse of public services.
A man, an Algerian sex offender, was arrested in London on Friday after being released by mistake nine days earlier; another, a British national convicted of fraud, was accidentally released from the same prison shortly after and turned himself in on Thursday.
Their cases follow the mistaken release of a convicted sex offender from a separate prison in October, sparking a three-day manhunt before he was rearrested.
At least four prisoners released by mistake over the past year remain at large, the BBC reports. More than 260 were released in error in England and Wales in the year to March, according to official data, more than double the figure from the previous year.
Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of Justice David Lammy said on Friday that he was “dismayed by the rate of erroneous releases” and had ordered “strict new release controls, launched an investigation and begun to overhaul archaic prison systems.”
He told parliament on Wednesday that the opposition Conservative Party, whose 14-year term in government was ended last year by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, had “left our prisons on the brink of total collapse”.
But the recent litany of errors coincides with the ruling Labor Party battling its own economic constraints and record unpopularity.
Britain’s prisons have been in crisis for several years, with the prison population more than doubling since 1990, while staff and infrastructure struggle to keep pace.
The Algerian offender, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, was released by mistake on October 29, although police say they were not informed until almost a week later. He was rearrested for unlawful liberty and suspected of assaulting an emergency worker in connection with an earlier incident.
As police dragged him into a van, he gave his own verdict on the system that had lost track of him: “Look at British justice, they release people by mistake,” he said. in a video broadcast by Sky News, British partner of NBC News.
It’s a throwaway line, but it gets to an uncomfortable truth. In a country where nothing seems to work as it should – from the courts to the national health system to the trains – even prisons cannot keep their doors locked.
Years of budget cuts are “catching up” with Britain’s public services, according to Glen O’Hara, professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University.
“The whole welfare system, for example, is completely overwhelmed,” he told NBC News on Saturday, adding that Britain’s prisons were overwhelmed by large numbers of short prison sentences.
“It’s simply overwhelming the system which cannot economically cope with all these numbers,” he said.
Last summer, the men’s prison system was almost bursting at the seams with only about 100 places empty, a crisis that triggered the government’s emergency release plan, allowing some inmates to get out after serving 40 percent of their sentences instead of the usual 50 percent. Introduced to alleviate overcrowding, the policy has since enabled the early release of almost 40,000 prisoners, according to Ministry of Justice figures.
Staffing issues have also affected services. Between June and June, almost 13% of staff left UK prisons, according to Prison and Probation Service data.
Prison officials said a clerical error meant there was no court warrant to detain Kaddour-Cherif, and he was released. Convicted fraudster William Smith has been released following a clerical error at the court, the BBC reports.
Wandsworth Prison, where Smith and Kaddour-Cherif were released, was built in 1851 to house fewer than 1,000 prisoners. An August 2024 report from the prison’s independent monitoring committee found the number of inmates had risen to 1,513.
“The wings were chaotic and staff in most units were unable to confirm the whereabouts of all prisoners during the workday,” the report said.
This Victorian-era prison, one of many still in use dating from the 1800s, has previously been the scene of high-profile escapes. Wandsworth made headlines in 2023 when former British soldier Daniel Khalife escaped by clinging to the underside of a truck while awaiting trial for espionage and terrorism offences.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said the recent cases “further expose the scale of the crisis in our prisons that we have inherited”, adding: “This will not be fixed overnight, but we are using every lever possible to tackle these errors. »
Despite all the headlines and investigations, mistakes continue to pile up in a country struggling to stay united, one open door at a time.
