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Any mistaken release of a prisoner is a blow to the criminal justice system and creates a danger to public safety and confidence. So is any escape, abscondment or failure to return after temporary release. Failures of this kind nevertheless occur every year in the UK penal systems – not regularly, but often enough for governments to produce annual statistics about them. They are particularly alarming malfunctions in what is already a seriously flawed and pressurised system.
The mistaken release of two separate prisoners from the same prison, however, is unusually disturbing. Human error seemingly played a part in allowing William Smith to walk out of HMP Wandsworth on Monday, the day he had been sentenced to 45 months for several fraud offences. That was bad enough. But the fact that he turned himself in on Thursday at the prison gates without being caught by a police manhunt simply compounds the record of official incompetence.
The reasons for the sex offender Brahim Kaddour-Cherif’s mistaken release from Wandsworth on 29 October are not as clear as in the Smith case. Nevertheless, he is both a known danger to the public and due to be deported. It is wrong that he had not been transferred to immigration detention. The fact that his absence was not noticed for six days is disgraceful. As Oscar Wilde, himself shamefully a Wandsworth inmate in 1895, might have said, to lose two prisoners in this way looks like carelessness. At the institutional level, though, it looks far worse.
The problem underlying these individual cases is that the criminal justice system has been consistently underfunded for years. The consequences include continued reliance on shocking Victorian prisons such as Wandsworth, a struggle to recruit and retain prison staff, poor middle management, cuts in probation, and continued overcrowding, produced in part by overlong sentences. There has been some reduction in overcrowding in the past year, and spending is slowly increasing, but Wandsworth is still operating at 166% of safe capacity. HMP Chelmsford, from which Hadush Kebatu, a convicted sex offender and asylum seeker, was mistakenly released last month, is operating at 133%.
These are indisputably crisis levels. Yet parliament, which is now in recess again, handled them inadequately this week. Labour has been in charge for well over a year now. So the justice secretary, David Lammy, was wrong to be both badly prepared and so angrily partisan. Mr Lammy, and no one else, is accountable for the system now. Nevertheless, it is absurd for the Conservatives, who squeezed the criminal justice system so hard and destructively during 14 years in power, to wax so outraged about recent cases under Labour.
The fact that mistaken releases in England and Wales more than doubled from 115 in the year ending March 2024 (when the Conservatives were in power) to 262 in the year to March 2025 (for most of which Labour was in government) is a genuine national concern. The reasons, however, go beyond human error or the perils of inefficient paperwork. Much of the increase is likely to reflect the much enhanced use of accelerated releases and prison transfers since Labour’s assault on overcrowding started. Nevertheless, all these problems are a reminder that this is a whole-system problem for criminal justice. It will not be satisfactorily solved unless and until the Ministry of Justice receives the level of funding and leadership that would mean it can be put right.
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