Last night, I received a text from someone in Government highlighting a Daily Express front page from December 2022.

The headline read: “Jail scandal: Criminals free to prowl street”. The key detail? More than 700 prisoners had either escaped or been “released in error” over the past 10 ten years.

Amongst those let out were sex offenders, drug dealers and violent robbers. In one case, a 16-year-old girl was raped by a sex offender mistakenly released by the prison service.

Fast-forward to 2024/25, 262 prisoners had been released in error in just 12 months.

In short, the problems highlighted by the shambolic handling of the Hadush Kebatu and Brahim Kaddour-Cherif are not new.

But they are unmistakably getting worse – and the blame game is intensifying. Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones blamed an antiquated system that relies on reams of physical paperwork.

But some are pointing towards the patchwork of sentencing reforms that are changing the release points for thousands of criminals.

And the figures support this claim. The number of erroneous releases has rocketed from 115 in 2023/24 to 262 in 2024/25 as ministers scramble to prevent the system from collapsing.

Mark Fairhurst, of the Prison Officers’ Association, warned the system had become overly complicated. By way of illustration, the discharging manager suspended over the release of Kebatu was responsible for going through the paperwork to ensure that the right prisoners were being released under the right conditions.

Others say the crisis was inevitable due to a lack of funding for the prison service over many years because it is not a “vote winner”. Andy Slaughter, chair of the Justice Select Committee, warned there is so much chaos in the system that more criminals will be let out by mistake.

The Justice Secretary, David Lammy, also claimed it “exposes deeper flaws across the failing criminal justice system we inherited”.

Perhaps a perfect illustration of the chaos is the chronology of events following the release of Hadush Kebatu, the migrant sex offender convicted of targeting schoolgirls.

Andy Davy, the governor of Wandsworth prison, was asked by the prison service to investigate Kebatu’s mistaken release.

A week later, Mr Davy’s own prison was at the centre of two scandals, with two offenders let out when they shouldn’t have been.

Zia Yusuf, Reform’s policy chief, compared it to a Monty Python sketch.

Former prison governor Ian Acheson said, following the debacle over Kebatu, “the first place you’d look at for this to happen is Wandsworth”, because of a litany of previous security failures, including the escape of Daniel Khalife, who was convicted of spying on behalf of Iran.

Its clear, at this critical moment with the justice system in crisis, that strong leadership is required. Because this problem has been known about for years. And it’s going getting worse.

Prisons may not be a vote winner, but failures in this policy area can destroy confidence in Governments.