Justice Secretary David Lammy has said 12 prisoners have been accidentally released in the past three weeks, two of whom are still at large.<\/p>\n
It comes on top of the 91 prisoners who were freed by mistake between April and October.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC, Lammy said there would always be a “human error” while prisons were using a paper-based system and that the situation would improve once a “completely digital system” was adopted.<\/p>\n
He said there had been “a spike” in accidental releases but added it was now on “a downward trajectory”.<\/p>\n
The subject of accidental releases gained attention after Hadush Kebatu, who was jailed after sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel in Epping, was mistakenly freed, leading to the government implementing new checks on those being let out of prison.<\/p>\n
The number of prisoners who have been let out in error has risen sharply in the past year, rising from 115 in 2023-2024 to 262 in the following year.<\/p>\n
Lammy acknowledged there had been a “spike” in numbers adding: “I want to bring it down. We have got a mountain to climb.”<\/p>\n
He said the problem had been partly caused by the system losing 6,000 officers under the previous Conservative government. <\/p>\n
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has previously blamed the increase in numbers on “the confusion created by Labour’s botched early release scheme”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justice Secretary David Lammy has said 12 prisoners have been accidentally released in the past three weeks, two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-294611","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}