The son of Ian Coates, who was fatally stabbed in Nottingham by Valdo Calocane, has said the government is ‘looking at the wrong end of the scale’ with their plans to release prisoners early to free up cells.
James Coates said he and his family live in fear they will bump into their father’s killer on the streets if he is released.
Speaking on GB News, James Coates said:
“It's not about letting [prisoners] out early because the police are saying that prisons are overcrowded: we need to create more prisons.
“I'm not going to kid ourselves here; the country is a shambles. Crime rates are massively high, knife crimes are disgustingly high. The deterrent for crime is next to nothing.
“There needs to be available cells for these criminals to go into which will put people off committing these crimes, because a lot of them know that they're just going to be back on the streets. .
“It's the fear for me that [the family of a victim] are going to walk around a corner and see this guy walking around the street. And it's things like that that you have with you forever.
“They've already lost the loved ones to such a gruesome attack. The last thing they wanted to run in is see this killer walking free.
“It's our biggest fear as well that someone like Valdo, a monster, it could be out in a few years.”
Asked about his own thoughts on Calocane’s charge and sentence he said:
“I was absolutely dumbfounded. To hear the words given to you by the defence and the judge after we've seen months and months of hard evidence; everybody's seen what he's done. Everybody knows how calculated it was. The fact was that this man - or this animal – was carrying a knife, which should already carry a prison sentence anyway. He’s brutally murdered my father and two innocent student stabbing them more than 50 times and he will never spend a day in prison. It’s just things like that, that just seem absolutely wild to me.
“In an ideal world, he needs to spend the rest of his life behind bars - if it's a hospital or a prison. But he needs to be held accountable. It needs to be punishment, because right now, he's a patient, he’s not a prisoner and when he's better and his mental health is to a manageable level, he will be released back into the community.
“And he's already shown over the years that he doesn't follow the rules. He doesn't believe that he's ill, he doesn't take medication. He's very violent, and he will do it again. And there's going to be other innocent people that are going to be affected by him and many others like him.
“Something needs to be done to stop that because I could never live with myself if he was released and somebody else got hurt.
“It’s massive struggle. Some days are a little bit better, some days aren't. We feel like we're reliving it all the time with all these inquiries and inquests but it's something we have to do.
“We can't bring our loved ones back but we can fight to make sure that this doesn’t happen again to somebody else.
"There needs to be a massive change because this can't happen again.”
