Prison governors in England have been summoned to an urgent meeting with ministers as the government comes under pressure over the wrongful release of two more prisoners, including a convicted foreign sex offender.
Alex Davies-Jones, a justice minister, told broadcasters she was “furious” about the “unacceptable” situation where an average of 22 people are wrongly released from prisons each month in England and Wales.
She said the “archaic” paper-based system within the prison service was partly to blame and that the government was introducing a “crack team” of digital experts to overhaul it.
She said the “reams and reams of paperwork” led to situations where people who had the same name or many aliases were mixed up. She also pointed to the impact of chronic spending cuts to the criminal justice system.
Lynne Owens, a retired senior police officer, is conducting a rapid review which Davies-Jones said would report back within the next few weeks.
David Lammy, the justice secretary, has been accused of being evasive at deputy prime minister’s questions on Wednesday when pressed by the Conservatives over whether there had been a wrongful release of an asylum seeker.
Brahim Kaddour Cherif, left, and William Smith, who were released in error from HMP Wandsworth. Photograph: Met police
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said Lammy’s responses to questions in the Commons had been a “disgrace” and a “total dereliction of duty”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “The second convicted sex offender, illegal migrant, in two weeks has been released accidentally from one of our prisons, despite the fact that the justice secretary after the first incident came to parliament and said that he was putting in place the most robust checks to ensure this never happened again.
“It took six days for the prison service supposedly to even become aware that this had happened and inform the Metropolitan police, who are now a week behind in the manhunt to find him. Then the justice secretary is informed about this on Tuesday night, didn’t come clean.”
Almost immediately after the exchange in the Commons on Wednesday it was revealed that an Algerian national, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, a sex offender who had overstayed his visa, had been wrongly released from Wandsworth prison in south London last Wednesday, with the Metropolitan police informed only on Tuesday.
HMP Wandsworth in London. Photograph: Lucy North/PA
Pressed on why Lammy didn’t tell the Commons about it, Davies-Jones told the Today programme that it “would have been inappropriate and potentially misleading to confirm anything where we didn’t have all of the facts”. The Conservatives had wrongly suggested that Kaddour-Cherif was an asylum seeker.
Davies-Jones was also asked whether Lammy had been shopping for a new suit before his appearance in the Commons on Wednesday, after being briefed on the wrongful releases. She said it was not “appropriate to get into the weeds of whether he was shopping or not”.
Later on Wednesday, it emerged that the same prison also accidentally freed 35-year-old William, or Billy, Smith. Described as white, bald and clean-shaven, he was sentenced to 45 months for multiple fraud offences on Monday and freed in error the same day.
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The errors come just days after Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian national, was accidentally freed from Chelmsford prison despite convictions for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman days after arriving in the UK in a small boat.
Lammy had ordered five pages of new checks for prison governors after the release of Kebatu, who was supposed to have been removed to an immigration detention centre.
Labour ministers have pointed out that prisons were in crisis when they came into power. Jenrick admitted that the last Conservative government’s record on prisons was “poor and unacceptable” but insisted it had worked to “keep people in jail”.
The meeting with governors will take place on Thursday and Lammy is also due to speak to the media after breaking ground on a new prison.
Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), said there were an average of 22 prison releases in error every month. The figure comes from government statistics published in July.
Fairhurst told BBC Breakfast: “The leaders of this service have known about this for over 12 months, but only now it’s in the spotlight. Are they doing something to remedy it?
“The POA have asked for a royal commission, because we realise that the entire criminal justice system at this moment in time is in complete meltdown. It’s not just prisons; it’s probation, it’s the court, it’s the police. And we want a royal commission to discover not just what’s gone wrong, but more importantly put it right.”
