Inside Britain’s ‘catastrophically mismanaged’ prisons where prisoners go missing, rules ignored, and inmates held overtime

Speaking to GB News, a former prisoner has laid bare instances where rules have failed to be enforced by guards, inmates have been held in excess of their sentences, and some prisoners have even been lost.

David Shipley, who was sentenced to 45 months in HMP Wandsworth for fraud back in 2020, told the People's Channel the whole system is being "catastrophically mismanaged".

Amid a storm of mistaken prison releases, Labour's minister for Courts and Legal Services admitted the number of errors has "crept up".

Between April 1 and October 31 of this year, 91 prisoners were accidentally released, while in the year to March 2025, there were 262 wrongful releases - up from 87 the year prior.

An investigation into the issue started when Ethiopian migrant Hadush Kebatu was released one month into a 12-month sentence after being found guilty of sexual assault. He is said to have presented HMP Chelmsford with the correct papers detailing a transportation, though these were wrongfully filed as release papers instead.

HMP Wandsworth in particular saw two high-profile inmates mistakenly released in quick succession: Billy Smith, who was let out on the same day that he was sentenced, and Algerian sex offender and visa overstayer Brahim Kaddour-Cherif. According to reports, prison staff did not know whether Kaddour-Cherif was in prison or not, and when he received a court summons, they didn't even know which prison he was in.

Mr Shipley said: "The Department of Justice, in a country which is supposed to be a developed, rich, civilised, high-functioning society, doesn't know if someone's in jail... That is because the people running the organisation are useless, and have created a system which cannot do the basics.

"It's simply not about the system, it's not because they're busy. This is just the basics of doing a decent job."

Recounting his experience in HMP Wandsworth, he said: "When I was a prisoner there, they would often lose people.

"They would realise they were short one prisoner, or they would lose track of prisoners within the jail.

"The year before I arrived, they had a man escape under a food delivery lorry, which might sound familiar, because that's exactly how Daniel Khalife escaped a few years later.

"At the time, they said, 'Okay, right, we need to have a new rule. We need to always look at these mirrors to look under the delivery lorries when they're leaving'. Fairly obvious, right?

"Clearly, by the time the Khalife's escape four years later, that was not happening. And it had been forgotten."

Earlier this week, Labour's minister for Courts and Legal Services, Sarah Sackman, admitted to GB News that the "trajectory [of mistaken releases] is simply not good enough."

"When we came in, there were 17 releases in error a month," she said.

"That's crept up to 22. And I agree, that's not good enough. It's really important that we get a grip on the situation."

The Deputy Prime Minister has cited an archaic, paper-based practice of keeping track of prisoners as partly to blame for the disorganisation of the prison system, which appears to be stuck in the pre-computer era.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said at the time: "This Government inherited a prison system in crisis and took decisive action to stop our prisons from collapsing.

"Public protection is our number one priority. That is why offenders out on licence face strict conditions such as exclusion zones and being tagged, and they can be brought back to prison if they break these rules.

"We are building 14,000 prison places - with 2,500 opened since last July - and reforming sentencing so our jails are never left to run out of space again."

The issue of mistaken releases came in the wake of Labour's plans to ease the prison overcrowding crisis with an early release scheme.

In July 2024, Labour sought to free up prison places quickly by allowing prisoners to be automatically released after serving just 40 per cent of their sentence in prison with the exception of those serving sentences for certain sexual, violent, domestic abuse, terrorism and national security offences.

Then-Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood touted the scheme would free up 5,500 places, but between September 2024 and June 2025, 38,042 prisoners were freed, according to MoJ figures.

Data released by the Ministry of Justice this week shows that a year on, the UK's total prison population is now 87,063, leaving just 2,287 free prison spaces in England and Wales and falling just 1,500 shy of the prison population as of September last year.

In the next five years, the prison population figure is projected to increase to a total of 103,600, meaning an additional 14,250 spaces will need to be found in order to accommodate the predicted number of inmates.

Mr Shipley continued to share his experience by describing what he saw as a lawless culture for both inmates and staff.

"Before going to prison, I knew there would be violence and drugs," Mr Shipley explained.

"I thought maybe the buildings would be in poor condition, and the food would be bad - those things were all true.

"But I assumed, as probably most people would, that there would be rules that would be structured, there'd be discipline, there'd be order. Actually, there just isn't.

"Basic rules just aren't upheld. For example, there are rules against vaping on the landings, and you weren't allowed to vape in your cells. Those rules were consistently ignored by prisoners and by staff.

"The problem with this sort of stuff is that, it sounds minor, but actually it creates a culture where people just think the rules don't matter, which is the exact wrong lesson to teach prisoners.

"Almost all of them are there because they've broken society's rules.

"We should be teaching that the rules do matter when they are serious. And you see it in the staff, as well, often just ignoring rules."

Mr Shipley also explained examples of prison officers turning "a blind eye" towards those openly taking drugs in prisons, to ensure they have an "easier day".

"If someone's off their face in their cell, in that moment, they're not causing a problem," he added.

"Obviously, downstream with that, you get the depths, the violence, the instability, the crime."

In a report on drugs within Britain's prisons, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor found "officers generally received very little training in this area despite being at the frontline of managing the impact of drugs."

Overcrowding and poor conditions also lead to prisoners missing entire educational courses to help rehabilitate inmates, some of which are even part of the sentence, the report added.

Labour has thus far blamed Tory cuts for the majority of prison issues, adding that overcrowding had forced their hand, but Mr Shipley disagrees.

"Yes, the prisons are overcrowded. Yes, Tory cuts meant that we lost a lot of experienced frontline staff. All that's true, but even if you fix all of those things, the system would still be broken," he said.

He added: "Wandsworth is overcrowded. The prison system is overcrowded, but I think I would very strongly challenge the idea that these problems are because of overcrowding.

"Because the Ministry of Justice, the prison service collectively, the senior officials are very good at pushing the blame somewhere else.

"So they will blame Tory cuts, they will blame overcrowding, they keep saying, 'Well, we haven't got a fully digital system. It's because it's manual, that's the problem'. And those are just excuses."

Mr Shipley also revealed that on top of the issue of early releases, prisoners are being released late and held unlawfully because officers are unaware of their release date.

Chief Inspector Taylor issued an Urgent Notification to the Secretary of State for Justice earlier this year after a review of HMP Pentonville uncovered a prison in a state of disarray, where many prisoners were being detained unlawfully after their release date.

He said it was an "endemic problem" that has got "much, much worse in the last couple of years" and is a symptom of a prison system at "breaking point".

"The Government needs to take action very quickly. In effect, people are being illegally imprisoned by the state because the prison is failing to calculate their sentence properly," he said.

Data from the review showed up to 20 per cent of those eligible for release had been held after their release date in the past six months.

"The system is breaking the law when it releases people," Mr Shipley said. "It holds people unlawfully. We've reached this catastrophic failure of competence, and the current leadership class of HMPPS are just useless.

"If this were any other organisation, you would sack the board. You'd get a completely new board in, a new chief executive, and you would say 'This needs to be ripped a piece.' We would absolutely not tolerate this board, but we just let them keep going on..."

However, despite Labour's numerous blunders, Mr Shipley refused to be drawn into criticism of the Justice Secretary.

"In a way, I don't really blame David Lammy," he said.

"He's grappling with this. I think he's allowing himself to be fobbed off in a way that Shabana [Mahmood] didn't.

"I think Mr Lammy is an easier mark for the civil servants in lots of ways."

A former prison governor, on the other hand, feels sticking the boot in on Labour is a justified action.

He said the current administration is responsible for a sharp spike in botched jail releases.

Ian Acheson told GB News: "The prison service committed operational suicide by getting rid of so many experienced (expensive) officers so quickly in pursuit of austerity. It was a criminally stupid and totally foreseeable disaster made in 11 Downing Street and executed in Whitehall."

"Releases in error have spiked sharply to coincide with multiple emergency mass release schemes introduced by Labour. I don't believe that making the system digital will be a fix. Because any system relies on humans inputting data. We need a dramatically simplified sentencing regime that can be operated by prison staff and makes sense to the public."

GB News has approached the MoJ for comment.

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