When a high profile prisoner, who has been found guilty of committing sex offences against young girls, is wrongly released from prison, and when you find out that last year 262 prisoners were released by mistake, you scratch your head in bewilderment. How on earth can such a thing happen?

The last high profile occasion I remember a prisoner escaping was the case of Daniel Khalifa, who escaped from Wandsworth prison by strapping himself underneath a food delivery van in 2023.

This case as different, though. Hardesh Kebatu didn’t escape. He was wrongly released. Indeed, not only that, when he left, he was told to make his own way to an immigration deportation centre. He apparently protested that he shouldn’t be sent out into the wide world, and four times returned to Chelmsford prison asking to be let back in.

In Khalifa’s case, much of the commentary blamed the Conservative government for his ability to escape. In Kebatu’s case, commentators are going out of their way NOT to blame the government. Strange, that,

In reality, of course, neither government can be held to blame for an individual prisoner escape or a false release. You can blame bad resource allocation or lack of funding all you like, but in the end the people to blame are the individual prison officers who didn’t do their jobs properly, and the prison governors who hadn’t imposed watertight operational systems.

It all feeds into the growing narrative that nothing works in this country. Individual failings in the NHS are constantly highlighted, trumping any minor coverage of NHS success stories. When a child in care is abused, no one mentions the thousands of children who receive excellent care. When a train runs late, no one ever thinks of the ones that don’t. As a nation, we love to glory in our own failings and misery, thinking it must be much better in other countries. The truth is, it generally isn’t and sometimes we need to give our heads a shake and thank our lucky stars we live in a country such as this.

Of course, there are huge problems to solve in most areas of our public policy, and I don’t seek to diminish those, but most public services are both complex and challenging to run. If everything were easy, do we not think all the problems would have been solved long before now? Our problem is that we think al of the problems revolve around spending more money. If that were the case, the NHS would be truly world-beating. No, it goes deeper than that. Certainly, with regard to the NHS its problems are often based around the fact that we have never actually had a honest debate about what it’s actually for and what we have a right to expect from it.

It’s simpler with regard to prisons. All we want from prisons is for them to keep dangerous criminals locked up, and while they are locked up their should be educated and rehabilitated so that when they return to society they are more likely to be law-abiding and better able to get a job.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?