If anyone was surprised at the idea that a single prison could accidentally release two people within a matter of days, then a brief glimpse at an inspection report for HMP Wandsworth from last year would quickly explain things.
Despite a high-profile escape from the south London jail only months earlier, conditions were so chaotic at the time of the inspection that most staff could not reliably say where all prisoners were during the day, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, reported with obvious near disbelief.
“There was no reliable roll that could assure leaders that all prisoners were accounted for,” he wrote. After the escape of the spying suspect Daniel Khalife, who strapped himself to the underside of a delivery van, “it was unfathomable that leaders had not focused their attention on this area”, he said.
As ever with the Prison Service, there is considerable context to this. Supposed to hold no more than 963 men, Wandsworth generally has about 1,500 kept in cramped and often dirty conditions, at times locked in cells for 22 hours a day.
Adding to the chaos is the transient status of many of the prisoners. According to another report on the jail, published this month by one of the independent monitoring boards that go into prisons to look at conditions, only 15% of Wandsworth’s inmates were serving sentences, with the rest either on remand, convicted but not yet sentenced, recalled to prison, or immigration cases.
Presiding over all this are about 85 staff, and often fewer. According to Taylor’s report, a combination of sickness and training commitments meant that at any one time a third of prison staff were not on frontline duties.
Those who were on the prison wings would generally be inexperienced. Across the prison service in England and Wales, every year about one in seven junior prison staff leave, and for senior officers the departure rate is one in eight.
At Wandsworth, Taylor found that this mass of inexperienced prison officers made implementing change difficult. “Staff were not wilfully neglectful, they simply did not understand their role and they lacked direction, training and consistent support from leaders,” he wrote.
It should be noted that in the wake of Taylor’s report some changes were made. The more recent independent inspection said that while it was still grossly overpopulated and understaffed, Wandsworth now enjoyed “positive new leadership and a sense of strategic direction”.
As a marker of this, while the prison was found to have no fewer than 81 identifiable security failings in September 2023 after Khalife escaped, by May this year that had been reduced to just four, although one of these was marked as “critical”.
But at the same time, conditions remain objectively grim, with more than 700 incidents of self-harm over the previous year, four deaths and more than 700 assaults, even if all these metrics are gradually improving.
Justice officials say it is perhaps unfair to label the prison as dysfunctional; more it is the inevitable result of very many people doing their best to improve matters in near-impossible circumstances in a cramped, inner-city Victorian prison.
Added to all this, and seemingly central to the inadvertent releases of Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, an Algerian sex offender who remains at large, and Billy Smith, a fraudster who handed himself back to the prison on Thursday, is antiquated or failing IT systems, meaning much of the logistics for releases and transfers are done by hand.
Mark Fairhurst, who heads the Prison Officers’ Association, said the incidents this week seemed to have been down to clerical errors, and his organisation “has repeatedly warned of the mounting pressures on staff and the outdated administrative systems across our prisons”.
He said: “Prisons throughout the country are underfunded, understaffed and operating under relentless strain. Dedicated staff are doing their utmost, but too often they are left without the proper support, training or technology to do their jobs safely and effectively.”
