\n<\/p>\n
The justice secretary has revealed that 91 prisoners have been released by mistake in England and Wales since April, and as many as four released in the last 15 months remain at large.<\/p>\n
David Lammy gave details in a Commons statement of three mistakenly released prisoners the police are trying to trace. He said the Prison Service was also investigating a fourth inmate released in error last Monday who may still be at large.<\/p>\n
The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, mocked Lammy for not knowing how many remain at large. \u201cThe justice secretary is so clueless, he\u2019s literally lost track of how many prisoners he\u2019s lost,\u201d he told MPs.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe says today a prisoner may have been accidentally released last Monday. Well, has he looked? He\u2019s either in his cell or he\u2019s not. What a complete and utter farce he\u2019s presiding over.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public are being endangered as this circus rumbles on week after week, with no end in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lammy blamed cuts under previous Conservative governments for the mistakes, and invited Jenrick to join him in apologising for the errors.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrontline prison officers were cut by a quarter between 2010 and 2017,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s around 6,000 fewer people and means that there are less experienced staff, which places more pressure on the system. Unsurprisingly, mistakes happen in those circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n
He confirmed that 262 prisoners had been freed in error in the year to March 2025 out of 57,000 releases, a 128% rise on the previous year. \u201cNew data my department published today shows that from April to the end of October this year, there were 91 releases in error from prison,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A No 10 spokesperson said the numbers were \u201csymptomatic of a system that the government inherited, of a prison system under severe strain, a failing criminal justice system\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public are right to be shocked by these cases. While they are rare, they have been rising year-on-year from an average of nine per month in 2023 to 17 per month the next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we\u2019re clear that you can\u2019t fix the prisons crisis overnight, but we have taken immediate action, including tougher new release checks, calling in prison governors, sending in tech experts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lammy said the release process required a radical overhaul. He outlined measures including the establishment of a justice performance board that he will chair each month and a \u00a310m AI scheme to \u201chelp frontline staff avoid mistakes and support them to calculate sentences accurately\u201d.<\/p>\n
Of the three prisoners known to be at large after being released in error none were sex offenders, he said.<\/p>\n
A class B drug offender was freed in August 2024, someone who failed to surrender to the police was freed in December 2024 and a prisoner convicted of aggravated burglary was freed in June 2025, he said.<\/p>\n
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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 Two were British and one a foreign national, he added.<\/p>\n Lammy\u2019s Commons statement came after Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, an Algerian sex offender, and Billy Smith, a fraudster, were accidentally freed from HMP Wandsworth. Smith handed himself in and police caught Kaddour-Cherif last week.<\/p>\n The errors came days after Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian national, was mistakenly freed from HMP Chelmsford despite his conviction for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman days after arriving in the UK on a small boat.<\/p>\n Lammy confirmed that the error leading to Kaddour-Cherif\u2019s release had happened in September, before tougher security checks were introduced.<\/p>\n He has faced criticism over his handling of the latest release in error after he repeatedly refused to confirm at prime minister\u2019s questions whether any more asylum seekers had been wrongly released since Kebatu.<\/p>\n Lammy said he had found out about the mistake on Wednesday morning, but the detail was released just after he had finished PMQs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The justice secretary has revealed that 91 prisoners have been released by mistake in England and Wales since April, and as many as four released in the last 15 months remain at large. David Lammy gave details in a Commons statement of three mistakenly released prisoners the police are trying to trace. He said the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[16102,999,311,7282,12403,8550,7903,2413,2414,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-33039","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-april","9":"tag-david","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-error","12":"tag-freed","13":"tag-lammy","14":"tag-prisoners","15":"tag-prisons","16":"tag-probation","17":"tag-wales"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33039","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=33039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}