Prisoners' Release

(asked on 25th January 2016) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners were wrongly released in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Andrew Selous Portrait
Andrew Selous
Second Church Estates Commissioner
This question was answered on 22nd March 2016

The number of releases in error for each of the last 6 years is shown in the table below.

Fewer than one in a thousand prisoners released are released in error. In the vast majority of cases where this does occur prisoners are returned quickly to prison. Any wrongful release is unacceptable. Each incident is investigated to see what lessons can be learnt and identify ways in which these errors can be eliminated.

Caution should be used in interpreting any trends from the figures due to the low numbers involved.

Releases in error from prison custody1, England and Wales 2009/10 to 2014/15

2009/10

2010/11

2011/12

2012/13

2013/14

2014/15

Total release in error

68

63

42

44

50

48

  1. Releases in error refer to cases where a prisoner has been released earlier from prison custody than intended. They can occur in a range of circumstances including; sentence calculation error, delays in receiving documentation and misapplication of policy. Some occur directly from a prison establishment but also from other locations such as courts.

Data Sources and Quality: Release in Error figures have been drawn from the NOMS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing the returns but the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although the figures are shown to the last case the figures may not be accurate to that level. Prior to 2011, there are quality concerns around Release in Error figures, and it is not possible to obtain accurate figures or identify the scale of inaccuracy in recorded figures as these were recorded in a manual database. A number of cases cannot be matched to legacy databases used at the time and some figures recorded may have referred to late releases, rather than early release in error.

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