When it was revealed at an explosive PMQs on Wednesday that Algerian sex offender Brahim Kaddour-Cherif had been mistakenly released from HMP Wandsworth, while the investigation into the accidental release and frenzied manhunt for the asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu a few weeks ago was still ongoing, the public reaction was shock and disbelief.
But not everyone was surprised. “It happens every working day,” the documentary filmmaker Chris Atkins tells me with resigned indignation. “It just doesn’t normally become news.”
Atkins has unusually direct expertise into this issue for a journalist. He was sentenced to five years for tax fraud in 2016 (as part of a complex case into tax loopholes exploited by investors in the film industry – a scheme from which Atkins did not personally benefit). He served most of his first year in Wandsworth, notorious as the worst prison in Britain.
He has written two books on his personal familiarity with Britain’s dysfunctional prison system, A Bit Of A Stretch and Time After Time, and hosts a podcast where he interviews former inmates about their experiences. So as someone who has seen up-close how people are processed in and out of prisons, I thought he could help explain how something as basic as making sure prisoners are released at the right time could go so wrong.
The problem isn’t new. While the number of mistakenly released prisoners has increased significantly in the past year, partly as a result of the government’s early release scheme to reduce dangerous overcrowding, it long predates Labour: between 40 and 115 offenders were incorrectly released every year from 2011 to 2024.
The reason? Bureaucratic errors: sentences wrongly recorded on a creaking byzantine system, time remaining miscalculated by overstretched staff, and miscommunication between prisons and the courts. The national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association Mark Fairhurst has said Kaddour-Cherif’s mistaken release was due to “a mix-up with the warrants” which meant the prison didn’t actually have the authority to hold him. The accidental release of yet another prisoner from Wandsworth, Billy Smith, who handed himself in three days later in a video that has gone viral, came down to another clerical error: the prison had not been told that a custodial sentence had been given.
But sometimes it’s even more basic than that. Atkins tells me of sentences confused due to illegible writing on carbon-copy paper forms (“somewhere higher up the chain they’ve read the judge’s handwriting wrong”) or even a mix-up of which prisoner is which. One of the ex-offenders interviewed in Time After Time managed to escape by pretending to be his twin brother. The two are not identical.
“I knew a guy who was mistakenly released and he told them it was early,” Atkins recounts. The prisoner explicitly asked not to be let out, as he knew he would just be recalled and didn’t want the disruption. “And they ignored him and shoved him out.”
The same is also true in reverse. A Bit Of A Stretch details the saga of Atkin’s cellmate Gary, stuck inside for weeks past his release date because of a mistake calculating his sentence. He tells me of another inmate in a similar predicament due to confusion over whether his multiple sentences were concurrent (served at the same time) or consecutive (served one after the other). Again, it was a handwriting issue (“You write ‘concurrent’ and ‘consecutive’ quickly and they’re going to look the same”).
“That never makes national news, because it’s some poor nasty prisoner who’s stuck inside for a bit longer,” Atkins adds. “When dangerous people are released early, that obviously gets the public’s attention. But it works both ways.”
After the Kebatu scandal, Justice Secretary David Lammy insisted he was implementing the “strongest release checks that have ever been in place”.
“I rolled my eyes going ‘that’s not going to work’. And lo and behold, it has not worked,” Atkins says. “It’s like, you’re looking for the needle in the haystack and you just keep on adding more hay.” He refutes the charge that the existing process for discharging prisoners is overly lax, recounting an inmate whose release took so long he missed his first probation appointment. But more bureaucracy does not necessarily equal stronger safeguards. Extra paperwork, extra forms to fill out and boxes to tick just create more work for under-pressure prison officers rushing through a convoluted release process to get onto the next prisoner.
The core problem at the heart of not just mistaken releases but every dysfunction in the prisons system is one of underfunding and understaffing. Justice spending between 2010 and 2020 was cut by 25 per cent, at the same time as prisoner numbers steadily increased. (England and Wales have the highest prisoner population per capita in Western Europe.) Sky News reports that the number of prisoners per staff member has increased from 1.9 to 2.4 on average since 2010, with overall staff numbers down 16 per cent over 15 years. There has also been a significant drop in experience levels. HMP Wandsworth and HMP Chelmsford, from which Kebatu was released, are among the most overcrowded prisons in the country, and staffing issues were key to the escape of Daniel Khalife from Wandsworth in 2023. A statement from Mark Fairhurst noted that “The Prison Officers’ Association has repeatedly warned of the mounting pressures on staff and the outdated administrative systems across our prisons”, adding that too often staff “are left without the proper support, training or technology to do their jobs safely and effectively”.
“Wrongful release is the tip of the iceberg,” Atkins warns. “It’s that moment that a little bit of light shines on the prison system.” But the consequences of underfunding manifest everywhere – in ways that can be seem beyond belief.
At Wandsworth, Atkins saw first-hand how staffing shortages made a mockery of what the justice system was trying to achieve. If not enough prison officers arrived in the morning (absences due to mental health issues have been soaring – unsurprising given the stress of the job and the horrors officers witness), it was the taxpayer-funded rehabilitation and education programmes that suffered.
“Officers aren’t in a classroom teaching English or gardening or whatever, but you need the officers to unlock the prisoners and take them to the English classroom. And when not enough officers turn up for the work that day, that is the first thing they cut.” Atkins, granted certain privileges as an orderly at Wandsworth (helping other inmates with education), recalls seeing teachers or drug addiction counsellors sat in empty classrooms, while the prisoners they were paying paid to teach or support were stuck in their cells 23 hours a day. “That lack of staffing which all comes down to the austerity cuts infects everything.”
Understaffing reached farcical levels when the task of keeping track of which inmates had left the wing was delegated from a prison officer to Atkins himself. “A registration job, which should have been done by an officer was being done by a prisoner. Even though I’d just been convicted of a very high-profile crime of dishonesty I was entrusted with basically maintaining wing security and tracking prisoner movements… You’d think they’d have gone ‘hang on, he’s just been done for fraud, maybe he’s not the best person to ask for this’. But they were just so short-staffed. ‘He can read and write, he’s got a pen, give him the job’.” As debates rage over public spending and which areas of the state deserve more or less money, I wonder how many people know our prisons are so understaffed inmates are having to fill in the gaps.
What’s the one thing Atkins would do to fix the prisons systems? “Spend money on more officers,” he says without hesitation. “Which is an odd thing for a prisoner to say because you’d think we hate officers. But we need more officers, because it means the place can start to run effectively.” He gives the Labour government a little credit for trying to undo some of the damage done by previous justice secretaries (notably Chris Grayling, whose tenure at the Ministry of Justice is widely considered a disaster even by Conservatives), but warns that making progress will take years. Prisons might only catch the public’s attention when a high-profile sex offender is let out by accident or when there’s an immigration angle to the story, but nothing about the events of the past few months is either new or surprising.
Investment in record-keeping and a functioning IT system is also critical. Kaddour-Cherif was spotted and re-arrested on Friday, more than a week after he was released by mistake. I ask Atkins about the process for tracking down prisoners who are accidentally let out. He tells me about his “escape file”, a paper folder on each prisoner listing the addresses of their parents and other information on where they might run to. Had he absconded, this information would be “faxed to the local police station… It’s really Porridge.” Like the handwritten sentencing notes, it’s a system from another era.
“They auctioned off the registry form from when Ronnie Biggs escaped from Wandsworth,” Atkins says. The logbook records the exact moment the Great Train Robber went on the run for 36 years, being signed out of his cell at 2.30 on 8 July 1965 to go to the exercise yard only to jump the wall and abscond. It went on sale at an auction in 2019. “This is a famous piece of paper because it shows Biggs, R leave to go to the yard and he doesn’t come back. They still had that paperwork when I was there. I saw it on the MailOnline. I remember seeing that and going, ‘I remember that!’” Atkins was at Wandsworth half a century after Biggs. The world has changed; the forms have not. “They’re still using the same one, decades later.”
[Further reading: Why do prisoners keep getting released by mistake?]
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