Two prisoners were mistakenly released from Wandsworth prison this week, leading police to launch a manhunt. One of the released prisoners, William Smith, handed himself in, while police continue efforts to recapture Brahim Kaddour-Cherif.
This comes less than a week after Justice Secretary, David Lammy, announced enhanced checks across prisons in England and Wales, following the wrongful release of Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford. Kebatu, convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, was freed on Friday and arrested two days later in north London.
These latest errors have prompted renewed scrutiny of England and Wales’s overstretched prison system and Lammy has been called to take urgent action. He told MPs an independent investigation had been commissioned into both cases. He described the recent ‘spike’ in mistaken releases as ‘unacceptable’ and said the prison service is being modernised with paper replaced by digital tools to reduce errors.
According to the Ministry of Justice’s annual prison digest, 262 prisoners in England and Wales were released in error in the year to March 2025, a 128% increase from 115 the previous year. Of these, 233 were released from prisons and 29 by the courts.
Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, said mistaken releases averaged 22 a month. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, he described the wider system as ‘in complete meltdown’, and’ and called for ‘a Royal Commission to discover not just what’s gone wrong, but more importantly, put it right.’
Fairhurst later told the BBC that untrained prison staff were left to calculate complex release dates by hand, under pressure from the early release scheme allowing some inmates to leave after 40% of their sentence. ‘Without proper training in sentence calculations or discharge procedures, errors are inevitable,’ he said.
Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones told BBC Breakfast she shared the public’s ‘frustration and fury’ but said the problems ‘won’t be fixed overnight’. She added that Labour would deliver 14,000 new prison places to ‘break the cycle’ and ensure space is always available for prisoners.
Lammy faced criticism for not disclosing the releases during his first Prime Minister’s Questions as Deputy, which Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, called a ‘dereliction of duty’. However, the government said Lammy was uninformed at the time and placed focus on the long-term challenges inherited in the prison system, including overcrowding and understaffing.
Prison governors in England have been summoned to an urgent meeting with ministers in response to the errors. The government has also commissioned a rapid review, led by retired senior police officer Lynne Owens, and is introducing digital experts to modernise release procedures and reduce mistakes.
