LONDON — It’s been a strange sort of prison break: no daring escapes, no Hollywood getaways — just inmates quietly released, by mistake, onto the streets of Britain.
What once might have been an isolated blunder comes at an unwelcome time in a country strained by rising prices, stagnant wages and crumbling public services.
One man, an Algerian sex offender, was arrested in London on Friday after being freed in error nine days earlier; another, a British national and convicted fraudster, accidentally released from the same prison shortly afterward and turned himself in on Thursday.
Their cases followed the mistaken release of a convicted sex offender from a separate prison in October, which sparked a three-day manhunt before he was rearrested.
At least four prisoners released in error over the past year remain at large, the BBC reports. More than 260 were wrongly released in England and Wales in the year to March, official data shows — more than double the figure the year before.
Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy said on X Friday that he was “appalled at the rate of releases in error,” and had ordered “tough new release checks, launched an investigation, and started overhauling archaic prison systems.”
He told Parliament on Wednesday that the opposition Conservative Party, whose 14-year spell in government was ended by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last year, had “left our prisons on the brink of collapse entirely.”
But the recent litany of errors coincides with the ruling Labour Party battling its own economic constraints and record-setting unpopularity.
British prisons have been in a state of crisis for several years, with the prison population more than doubling in size since 1990, while staffing and infrastructure struggle to keep pace.
The Algerian offender, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, was mistakenly let out on Oct. 29, though police say they weren’t informed until nearly a week later. He was rearrested for being unlawfully at large and on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker in connection with an earlier incident.
As officers bundled him into a van, he offered his own verdict on the system that lost track of him: “Look at the justice of the U.K., they release people by mistake,” he said in a video aired by NBC News’ British partner Sky News.
It’s a throwaway line, but it lands with an uncomfortable truth. In a country where little seems to function as it should — from the courts to the National Health Service to the trains — even the prisons can’t quite manage to keep the doors locked.
Years of budget cuts are “catching up” with Britain’s public services, according to Glen O’Hara, a professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University.
“The whole system of social care, for instance, is completely overwhelmed,” he told NBC News on Saturday, adding that Britain’s prisons had been swamped by a large number of short prison sentences.
“It’s just overwhelming the system that can’t cope economically with all these numbers,” he said.
Last summer, the men’s prison system was nearly filled to capacity with only a hundred or so empty places, a crisis that triggered the government’s emergency release scheme, allowing some inmates to leave after serving 40% of their sentence instead of the usual 50%. Introduced to ease overcrowding, the policy has since seen nearly 40,000 prisoners released early, Ministry of Justice figures show.
Staffing issues have also plagued the services. In the year to June, nearly 13% of staff left British prisons, according to data from the Prison and Probation Service.
Prison officers said a clerical error meant there was no warrant from the court to hold Kaddour-Cherif, and he was let go. William Smith, the convicted fraudster, was released as a result of a clerical error at the court level, the BBC reports.
Wandsworth prison, where Smith and Kaddour-Cherif were released, was built in 1851 to house fewer than 1,000 prisoners. An August 2024 report by the prison’s independent monitoring board found inmate numbers had grown to 1,513.
“Wings were chaotic and staff across most units were unable to confirm where all prisoners were during the working day,” the report said.
The Victorian-era prison, one of many still in use dating back to the 1800s, has previously been the scene of high-profile escapes. Wandsworth made headlines in 2023 when former British soldier Daniel Khalife escaped by clinging to the underside of a lorry while awaiting trial for espionage and terrorism offenses.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that the recent cases “further expose the scale of the crisis in our prisons we inherited,” adding: “This will not be fixed overnight, but we are using every possible lever to bear down on these errors.”
For all the headlines and investigations, the mistakes continue to pile up in a country struggling to hold itself together, one unlocked gate at a time.
