\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Alex Davies-Jones, a justice minister, told broadcasters she was \u201cfurious\u201d about the \u201cunacceptable\u201d situation where an average of 22 people are wrongly released from prisons each month in England and Wales.<\/p>\n
She said the \u201carchaic\u201d paper-based system within the prison service was partly to blame and that the government was introducing a \u201ccrack team\u201d of digital experts to overhaul it.<\/p>\n
She said the \u201creams and reams of paperwork\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Lynne Owens, a retired senior police officer, is conducting a rapid review which Davies-Jones said would report back within the next few weeks.<\/p>\n
David Lammy, the justice secretary, has been accused of being evasive at deputy prime minister\u2019s questions on Wednesday when pressed by the Conservatives over whether there had been a wrongful release of an asylum seeker.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Brahim Kaddour Cherif, left, and William Smith, who were released in error from HMP Wandsworth.<\/span> Photograph: Met police<\/p>\n Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said Lammy\u2019s responses to questions in the Commons had been a \u201cdisgrace\u201d and a \u201ctotal dereliction of duty\u201d.<\/p>\n Speaking on BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme, he said: \u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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\u2019t come clean.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/span>HMP Wandsworth in London.<\/span> Photograph: Lucy North\/PA<\/p>\n Pressed on why Lammy didn\u2019t tell the Commons about it, Davies-Jones told the Today programme that it \u201cwould have been inappropriate and potentially misleading to confirm anything where we didn\u2019t have all of the facts\u201d. The Conservatives had wrongly suggested that Kaddour-Cherif was an asylum seeker.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cappropriate to get into the weeds of whether he was shopping or not\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Get the day\u2019s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Labour ministers have pointed out that prisons were in crisis when they came into power. Jenrick admitted that the last Conservative government\u2019s record on prisons was \u201cpoor and unacceptable\u201d but insisted it had worked to \u201ckeep people in jail\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers\u2019 Association (POA), said there were an average of 22 prison releases in error every month. The figure comes from government statistics published in July.<\/p>\n Fairhurst told BBC Breakfast: \u201cThe leaders of this service have known about this for over 12 months, but only now it\u2019s in the spotlight. Are they doing something to remedy it?<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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\u2019s not just prisons; it\u2019s probation, it\u2019s the court, it\u2019s the police. And we want a royal commission to discover not just what\u2019s gone wrong, but more importantly put it right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cfurious\u201d about the \u201cunacceptable\u201d situation where an average of 22 people are wrongly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4585,311,582,321,2798,2413,2414,2308,15247,4251,5585],"class_list":{"0":"post-32366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-chiefs","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-meeting","11":"tag-ministers","12":"tag-prison","13":"tag-prisons","14":"tag-probation","15":"tag-releases","16":"tag-summoned","17":"tag-urgent","18":"tag-wrongful"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}