‘Completely unacceptable’ that mistaken prisoner releases have gone up under Labour, minister says – UK politics live

By Yohannes Lowe · The Guardian World

‘Even one is too many,’ culture secretary Lisa Nandy tells Sky News The Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Peter Walker , provides some context behind the erroneous prison releases in this useful analysis piece which zooms in on HMP Wandsworth , the category B jail in south London cast into the headlines once again after the mistaken release of two prisoners in a week. Here is an extract: 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. All I knew was we had a tip-off there was another such case, we didn’t know for certain. You can’t know for certain unless you’re running the department and he stood up and answered my questions. Continue reading...