UK Prisons: The Great Escape

 

Our prison system does appear to be in something of a crisis at present....

It has been full to bursting over at least the last 5 years. Reasons quoted for this include lack of investment by successive governments, over-enthusiastic sentencing policies., etc , etc., and no-doubt the current administration will at some stage attempt to  blame it exclusively on the now infamous ‘Tory Black Holes’ as they do for most other things that have failed, or are currently failing, under their watch….(I wouldn't be surprised if they blamed them for their administration's eventual demise!)

The sad fact is that we really can’t afford to imprison as many people as we do – not surprising given that the current cost of maintaining a prisoner in jail for a year is now well north of £50k. Building new prison estate to modern standards, let alone replacing all our Victorian jails, would cost tens if not hundreds of billions. Even then, we would need to forcefully eradicate the organised criminality that is rife within our jails before being a prison officer became at all attractive enough to staff then all fully.

The current administration clearly don’t have much of a clue how to sort this one out. There was a flurry of optimism when the bright idea of reducing the earliest release date from 50% to 30% of the full term was mooted. The results since then however have been lacklustre; what little relief that came from the early release of several thousand extra prisoners has evaporated, with prisons >98% full again. Many of those released have been returned on breaking their parole conditions.

Last week’s debacle, where not one but 2 prisoners were let out of Wandsworth by mistake, hard on the heels of the media-grabbing Colchester error, must be a strong contender for the ‘Lammy of the Year award 2025’, not least because the instigator of the Dead Ringers-inspired award is now personally responsible for the ministry in charge.

How and why did all this happen ?

Our prisons have always been somewhat ‘leaky’, in that prisoners can, and do, get released by mistake. 

The usual trickle does seem to have turned into something of a flood over recent months, however, and this is causing both concern to all and acute embarrassment to the authorities. Outright escapes are fortunately fairly rare, but the idea of a convicted murder or sex offender being released onto our streets at all, let alone ‘in error’ does not inspire confidence in the general population. 

Authorities put it the increase down to the complexity of the tracking process and the lack of staff (the knee jerk imposition of yet more paperwork by Justice before any prisoner can be released will probably hinder rather than help solve the problem).

There is, however, another interesting theory going the rounds that could help solve the conundrum….

It revolves around the fact that most processes that aim to maintain a 'steady state' have some form of overflow system.

The recent outrage about sewage releases into our rivers, for example, brought to light the fact that water companies have automatic release policies when heavy rainfall events ‘swamp’ the capacities of their sewage works. This is to prevent sewage backing up into our plumbing systems, and effectively dumps untreated sewage into rivers through sluice-controlled outflows. This has got them into hot water (apologies for the unintended pun) recently, and still needs to be addressed. Might it therefore not be possible that prisons have a similar ‘auto overflow’ system for 'surplus' prisoners ?

A simple ‘prisoner chute’, perhaps located in the prison laundry area, whereby the nearest prisoner was 'acquired' in some way and then ejected down the chute and into the street, might be the mechanism employed. This would not be active all the time, but could be arranged to cut in automatically (possibly via an AI generated program) when the total prisoner complement reached a certain level. It would however need to be random so as not to arouse suspicion amongst the inmates and staff (or indeed attract crowds of hopeful inmates to the laundry !).  

I would advise the minister to eliminate this possibility as a priority in his ‘root cause analysis’ before addressing other possible causes.

The wonderful John Cleese sketch about a hapless Zookeeper would seem particularly apt as an entertaining note on which to finish this blog.

Enjoy…..

First published 7.11.25