Yesterday His Majesty’s Prison Service released a sex offender by mistake. That would be bad enough on its own, but this particular sex offender was Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant whose assault on a 14-year-old girl sparked weeks of protests in Epping. Kebatu was only sentenced last month, receiving a 12-month sentence for two sexual assaults which he committed just eight days after arriving in the UK.
Kebatu had been held at HMP Chelmsford, and was due to be handed over to a Home Office operated immigration removal centre before his deportation from the country. Instead of doing this, the prison released him this morning.
According to the Prison Service, they ‘are urgently working with police to return an offender to custody following a release in error at HMP Chelmsford’. They have said that ‘public protection is our top priority, and we have launched an investigation into this incident.’
What has actually happened? Kebatu will have been on a list yesterday morning, showing that he was leaving the prison. An officer will have unlocked him from his cell and escorted him to the jail’s ‘reception’, where new arrivals and those about to be transferred or released wait to be processed.
At some point a member of reception staff will have misread instructions regarding Kebatu, and released him. He’ll probably have walked out with his ‘release grant’ of £89.52 in cash. I understand that the officer in question is experienced and distraught at the error. They have been removed from duties while the investigation is ongoing.
Kebatu is a high-profile prisoner. This is incredibly humiliating for the Prison Service, and likely to provoke anger and outrage, especially in Epping. This is almost certainly not a conspiracy. In fact, while the Ministry of Justice briefs journalists that releases in error are incredibly rare, they’re actually becoming more common.
In the year ending March 2023, 81 prisoners were released in error. The following year it rose to 115, and then last year it reached an astonishing 262 incidents.
This seems ridiculous. Prisons are supposed to do many things – punish, rehabilitate, protect the public, show that justice is done. As I’ve often written they are bad at many of these tasks. But at the most basic level prisons are supposed to keep inmates jailed until it is the lawful time to release them. That our jails struggle so much with this is a sign of quite how broken the system is.
It should not be difficult or complicated to correctly calculate release dates, or to issue accurate instructions for transferring prisoners and ensure they are followed. And yet, time and again, our prisons demonstrate they can’t do the basics.
Our jails are just terrible
Another recent example is HMP Pentonville, which received an ‘Urgent Notification’ from the prison inspectors in July. In that report it was disclosed that ‘many prisoners had been illegally imprisoned beyond their release date’, and that staff ‘were unable to account for the whereabouts of their prisoners during the day’.
When that report was published the Prison Governors’ Association responded with a press release full of excuses, and complaining about the ‘language used by the Chief Inspector’. They seemed singularly unwilling to recognise that prison governors are responsible for their jails, and are at fault if the basics are not being done.
This is the problem with our Prison Service. While there are some decent governors, the management culture as a whole is one of excuses, blaming others and avoiding responsibility. That’s why we don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain Hadush Kebatu’s accidental release – our jails are just that terrible. It’s not just money or overcrowding or old buildings that are the problem. The people in charge need to change. Perhaps this latest shameful failure will cause ministers to act.
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