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A fraudster mistakenly released from prison this week has handed himself back in as a hunt continues for a convicted sex offender who was also accidentally freed.
While David Lammy, the justice secretary, insisted the government would clampdown on clerical errors, William Smith was filmed waving to cameras and hugging his partner before he walked back into HMP Wandsworth, in south-west London.
Smith, 35, usually known as Billy, had been sentenced to 45 months for multiple fraud offences at Croydon crown court on Monday, but was then released in error by the prison.
A clerical mistake by the court led to the prison being told it was a suspended sentence, which meant he no longer had to be detained. The court corrected the error but HMP Wandsworth was not informed.
An Algerian sex offender, Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, who was released from Wandsworth by mistake last week, remains at large.
The Met police, who are hunting him, were only told about his release on Tuesday and have expressed frustration over his “six-day head start”.
The accidental release of the two men intensified pressure upon Lammy, who last week had announced a checklist to ensure prisoners were not freed in error after the release of Hadush Kebatu on 24 October.
Prison governors were called to a meeting with Lammy in Leicestershire on Thursday. Speaking afterwards, the lord chancellor told reporters that the accidental release of Kaddour-Cherif happened before the new checklist was in place.
“We have found out that the release that has caused concern this week was actually before I introduced those checks just a few weeks ago following the release of Kebatu. And the other prisoner was a court mistake not, in fact, a prison mistake.
“But the truth is I’ve been in post two months – the rate of release by error is too high,” he said.
The “paper-based” system which is used to process criminals at prisons, courts and in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) will be overhauled, he said.
“We had 800 errors under the last government, this has now gone on for a generation. Our prison system is in crisis so we have to bear down on this but we have a mountain to climb,” he said.
Lammy has faced scrutiny over his handling of the mistaken release of Kaddour-Cherif after he refused to answer questions put to him on the issue in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Parliament had not been misled, he insisted. “I took the judgment that it is important when updating the house and the country about serious matters like this that you have all of the detail,” he said.
A senior Labour MP said the government “has to take responsibility” for the wrongly released prisoners’ crisis. Andy Slaughter, the chair of the Commons justice committee, told Sky News that the prisons’ system was “chaotic” and suffered from inadequate staffing and lack of modern technology.
Asked who was to blame for the current situation, he told Sky News: “The government has to take responsibility, the Labour government going forward. I think if you’re looking at how we’ve got here, you’re talking about years if not decades. And it’s not one issue, it’s an accumulation of issues.”
The number of prisoners released by mistake has more than doubled in one year, official figures show.
In the year to March, 262 were freed in error, compared with 115 the previous year, according to data from the MoJ.
Prison sources say the overcrowding crisis was partly to blame for the sharp increase in “releases in error” – the official description for the mistakes.
Before the meeting, the Prison Governors’ Association described releases in error as “neither rare nor hidden”, but said the scale of them was “deeply concerning”.
In a statement, the PGA insisted only 0.5% of prisoners were not released on the correct date, but added: “While that may appear to be a small percentage, in a system managing tens of thousands of releases and transfers each quarter, it does represent a significant operational failure.”
The Metropolitan police has meanwhile continued to appeal to the public over the whereabouts of Kaddour-Cherif, who the force believes is still in London just over a week after his release.
“We are actively searching for Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, who was released in error from HMP Wandsworth on Wednesday 29 October. He is believed to be in London and has links to Tower Hamlets and Westminster. If you see him, please call 999 immediately,” the Met said.
Kabatu was wrongly released from Chelmsford prison and attempted to walk back into prison at least four times. He was eventually apprehended in Finsbury Park, north London, and given money as he was deported to Ethiopia.
