A union leader has accused the Ministry of Justice of 'unjustly' targeting a single member of staff over the mistaken release of the Epping hotel sex attacker.
Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the Prison Officers' Association (POA), said one person - a discharging manager - had been suspended over the freeing of Hadush Kebatu despite at least two more senior figures also being involved.
Quite right, Mark? Can I assume they have a different union to the one your low-level drone belongs to?
The POA member who has been suspended was responsible for going through paperwork to ensure the right prisoners were being released under the right conditions. However, he was checking paperwork that had been processed by more senior colleagues.
Two of them, to be precise:
Fourteen days before a prisoner is released, a 'hub manager' in the offender unit looks at the paperwork to ensure the right inmate is being released under the right conditions. Twelve days later, a more senior manager - at governor level, checks the paperwork, the licence and the warrant to ensure the correct person is being set free.
And it seems this it not the only time their oversight has been found wanting. Far from it:
It is not the first time HMP Chelmsford has released an inmate by mistake, with the prison also conned into freeing a fraudster two years ago.
As usual in these articles, we go to the PM for a word, as if he doesn't have a record for tolerating utter howling incompetence in his subordinates:
Asked today when the sex offender would be removed from the country, the Prime Minister's official spokesperson said 'you have us on record from this morning that we expect that to happen imminently', and suggested that would be within a few days. He said prison release errors 'are never acceptable' and 'this is another symptom of the justice system crisis inherited by this Government having suffered cuts to staffing, failure to build prison places' and 'chronic underinvestment'.It comes as the chief inspector of prisons said mistakes over prisoner releases are happening 'all the time' and are symptomatic of the chaos within the system.
Oh, it's all the Tories' fault somehow. Who could see that one coming?





