LONDON — It was a strange kind of prison break: no daring escapes, no escapes to Hollywood – just prisoners mistakenly released. streets of Britain.
What might once have been an isolated mistake comes at an unfortunate time in a country struggling with rising prices, stagnant wages and collapsing public services.
One man, an Algerian sex offender, was arrested in London on Friday after being released by mistake nine days earlier; the other, a British citizen and convicted fraudster, coincidentally walked out of the same prison shortly after and surrendered on Thursday.
Their affairs followed wrongful release of a convicted sex offender from a separate prison in October, sparking a three-day manhunt before he was recaptured.
At least four prisoners wrongfully released over the past year remain at large, the BBC reports. More than 260 people have been mistakenly released in England and Wales since the start of the year, more than double the figure the year before, official figures show.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice David Lammy X said Friday that he was “appalled by the number of erroneous releases” and ordered “a tough review of new releases, launched an investigation and began an overhaul of the archaic prison system.”
On Wednesday he told parliament that the opposition Conservative Party, whose 14-year tenure in government had ended Prime Minister Keir Starmer last year “brought our prisons to the brink of complete collapse.”
But the recent list of mistakes coincides with the ruling Labor Party struggling with its own economic constraints and record unpopularity.
Britain's prisons have been in crisis for years, with the prison population more than doubling since 1990 and staffing levels and infrastructure struggling to keep up.
The Algerian criminal, 24-year-old Brahim Kaddour-Chérif, was mistakenly released on October 29, although police say they were not informed about this until almost a week later. He was rearrested on charges of being unlawfully at large and on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker in connection with a previous incident.
As officers bundled him into a van, he delivered his own verdict on a system that had lost sight of him: “Look at British justice, they release people by mistake,” he said. in a video shown by NBC News UK affiliate Sky News.
It's a cliche phrase, but it contains an unpleasant truth. In a country where little seems to function properly – from the courts to the NHS to the trains – not even prisons can keep their doors locked.
Years of budget cuts are “catching up” with Britain's public services, according to Glen O'Hara, professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University.
“For example, the whole welfare system is completely overwhelmed,” he told NBC News on Saturday, adding that Britain's prisons are overwhelmed with large numbers of short-term prisoners.
“It's just overwhelming a system that can't economically handle all these numbers,” he said.
Last summer, the men's prison system was nearly full, with only about a hundred empty beds. This crisis led to the launch of the government's emergency release scheme, allowing some prisoners to leave after serving 40% of their sentences instead of the usual 50%. The policy was introduced to relieve prison overcrowding and has since led to the early release of nearly 40,000 inmates, according to the Justice Department.
Personnel problems also plague the services. Almost 13% of staff had left UK prisons as of June, according to the Prison and Probation Service.
Prison officials said that due to a technical error, the court did not issue a warrant for Kaddour-Sherif's detention, and he was released. William Smith, convicted of fraud, has been freed as a result of a clerical error at court level, the BBC reports.
Wandsworth Prison, where Smith and Kaddour-Sherif were released, was built in 1851 and housed fewer than 1,000 prisoners. An August 2024 report by the prison's independent review board found that the prison population had risen to 1,513.
“The units were in chaos, and staff in most units were unable to confirm where all inmates were located during the workday,” the report said.
The Victorian-era prison, one of many still in use dating back to the 1800s, has previously been the site of high-profile escapes. Wandsworth made headlines in 2023 when former British soldier Daniel Khalife escaped by clinging to the underside of a truck while awaiting trial on espionage and terrorism charges.
A Justice Department spokesman said the recent cases “further reveal the scale of the crisis in our prisons that we have inherited,” adding: “This will not be fixed overnight, but we are using every lever possible to right these wrongs.”
Despite all the headlines and investigations, mistakes continue to pile up in a country that is struggling to hold itself together by opening one door at a time.
