Copyright newstatesman
Less than two weeks ago, prisoner and convicted sex offender Hadush Kebatu was accidentally released from HMP Chelmsford when he should have been taken to a deportation centre. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick called it a “national embarrassment.” Keir Starmer said the government “must make sure this doesn’t happen again”. Since then it has happened twice. Only five days later, an Algerian man, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, also believed to have committed a sex offence, was mistakenly released from HMP Wandsworth. Then, on 3 November, William Smith, who was serving a sentence for fraud at the same prison, was also unintentionally released. HMP Wandsworth is the same jail that made headlines two years ago when Daniel Khalife escaped by strapping himself to the underside of a van. Kaddour-Cherif is yet to be recaptured. For most people, it’s incomprehensible. How can prisoners be released from prison by accident? But for those working inside the system, it reveals something more troubling: the collapse of communication and oversight that comes from a workforce under-resourced and overstretched. In cases like Kebatu’s, where a prisoner is subject to deportation after completing a sentence, responsibility for their removal can pass through several agencies. With so many parties involved, clear lines of responsibility are essential to prevent confusion about who has authority at each stage. I have had more than a hundred conversations with people in the system on my podcast, Evolving Prisons, and many personal discussions with officers. It is clear that chronic understaffing and under-resourcing create the kind of pressures where mistakes can happen. Officers point to communication failures as one of the biggest risks in managing prisoner releases. When information passes between multiple departments – sometimes across public and private providers – details about a person’s release conditions can get lost or misunderstood. In an overstretched system, with staff who may not always have the experience or resources they need, these small gaps in understanding can quickly spiral into serious mistakes that compromise both safety and trust in the system. These failures don’t happen in a vacuum. They unfold when systems are buckling under pressure. Prison officers are understaffed and many are inexperienced. More than half have been in the job for less than five years. Recruitment of prison officers in England and Wales has now been centralised, meaning the process is done largely online, and the 12-week training delivered to staff is among the shortest in Europe. Fifty-six per cent of officers who left the service in the year to June 2025 had less than three years’ experience. This is coupled with overcrowding and chronic underfunding. Prison officers are dealing with near-record numbers of prisoners and assaults against officers are at a record high. It’s little wonder that poor mental health was the leading cause of sick leave among prison officers in the year to June 2025. Beyond the gates, public confidence in the prison system is eroding. Only 33 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll in May 2025 felt that the prison system is functioning well at protecting the public from dangerous criminals. Seventy-five per cent believed that, overall, the system is functioning badly. When politicians rush to promise that such incidents “must never happen again,” they overlook the reality that the people working in the system are often already at their limits. These mistakes are the visible symptoms of a workforce stretched too thin. Behind every headline about our broken prison system are thousands of moments where staff, under immense strain, manage to hold the system together. But eventually, fatigue, stress and relentless pressure take their toll. The public find mistakes like these deeply alarming. The main purpose of prison is to hold those considered a threat to society in secure custody, yet repeated errors undermine that fundamental trust. Every accidental release feeds fear and anxiety, raising questions about whether the system can truly protect communities. When people begin to doubt that offenders are being properly contained, confidence in the justice system erodes. The government can talk about increasing the prison estate, but until it confronts the reality of chronic understaffing, mistakes will continue. Staff will be further demoralised, and the public will lose what little trust they still have in the justice system. [Further reading: Wes Streeting on “scandalous” failings in Oxford maternity care]
