On Friday, Hadush Kebatu was supposed to be transferred from HMP Chelmsford to the custody of the Home Office, taken to an immigration centre, and deported back to his home country of Ethiopia. The prison has a large proportion of foreign-national offenders, so this ought to have been routine. Instead, he was erroneously released. A manhunt ensued, and he was found by the authorities in East London yesterday morning. Justice Secretary David Lammy has promised that Kebatu will be deported in a matter of days. Yet the mistaken release and subsequent clumsy manhunt provide an encapsulation of the twin problems of a decrepit prison system and a strikingly incompetent police force.

In September, Kebatu was sentenced to 12 months in prison and given a five-year sexual harm prevention order for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Essex. In the wake of his arrest, there were large protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, where he was living.

Reports suggest that when he was released on Friday, he was confused by the process and repeatedly asked the officers outside the prison gate for assistance. It appears that over an hour elapsed before anyone at the jail raised the alarm, by which time he was heading for the capital. Kebatu was said to have contacts in London and access to funds, reportedly augmented by the £76 subsistence allowance he was wrongly given by dispatching staff. Because of that cash in hand, he left precious little electronic evidence of his progress — yet the transport system is festooned with CCTV and London is the most surveilled city in Europe. Just like when terror suspect Daniel Khalife escaped from HMP Wandsworth two years ago, it was ultimately a tip-off by the public that led to his apprehension. Red faces all round.

Kebatu’s victims will be relieved that he is back in custody, but anyone interested in avoiding a dangerous descent into a low-trust society should not be. Failure to stop the small boats combined with sneakily housing large numbers of unvetted, culturally alien men in the public’s midst has caused huge social tension. Kebatu’s accidental release is the apogee of this dysfunction. It is so unbelievably incompetent that many on social media now theorise it must be deliberate. It’s difficult to argue against this position — but the truth is worse.

What happened at HMP Chelmsford is not a one-off blunder: it is a symptom of the collapse of security within our prison system that was decided in 11 Downing Street and executed by Whitehall. Austerity measures introduced in 2010 gutted the prison service of frontline experienced personnel. Every metric of safety and order plunged as a result.

In the last five years, we have had multiple female officers convicted of sexual misconduct with prisoners, atrocious levels of assault against staff, dozens of offenders released in error under emergency mass-release schemes, drones hovering like “wasps” delivering drugs and other contraband to high-security prisons, and terrorist attacks inside jails by convicted extremists.

Responding to the latest breach, Lammy said he was “livid” and vowed that there would be extra checks from prison governors. But this is a performative reflex rather than a strategic fix. Elaborate checks — which should already be in place — failed at Chelmsford. The Ministry of Justice is allergic to the sunshine of scrutiny, so we are unlikely to see which details the Lord Chancellor’s promised investigation will bring. It is safe to assume, though, that none of the Whitehall bureaucrats funded so generously by the taxpayer will pay any price.

HMP Chelmsford’s reputation was dented in 2020, following a disastrous inspection in which inspectors effectively walked out of a “violent and unsafe” prison. In 2021, a report concluded that special measures implemented at the prison in 2018 had been “largely ineffective in improving outcomes”. Poor coordination and staff inexperience are major problems in this stressed and busy place. Tellingly, the last inspection which highlighted many improvements spoke of increasing prisoner “churn” at Chelmsford, “managing more admissions, transfers and immediate releases without additional resources”.

The fact that Kebatu could continually ask prison staff for help while they let him stroll free speaks to the absurdity of Britain’s failing system. Had he been a far more violent offender, who knows what could have happened — and it would be the Government’s fault. It would be easy to throw a junior officer under the bus for this awful blunder. But Lammy should turn his attention to the officials at the top of this failing institution, and those in the Ministry of Justice.

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Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.

NotThatBigIan

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