LETTER FROM LONDON
The British prison system is failing everywhere. And it is the Labor government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer that is paying the price, although it is not responsible for the decades of neglect that led to its negligence. On October 24, British authorities were forced to admit that a man named Hadush Kebatu, 41, an Ethiopian asylum seeker who had just weeks earlier been sentenced to a year in prison for sexual assault, had just been released by mistake from Chelmsford prison, northeast London, where he was being held.
He was due to be transferred to an immigration detention center before being deported to Ethiopia but there appears to be a mistake in his name – an investigation is underway – and the Chelmsford administration told him he was free. According to the daily GuardHadush Kebatu returned several times to the prison gates, in disbelief, not really understanding what he was doing there. He then headed for Chelmsford town center where, the following day, surveillance cameras captured him, still wearing his gray prison tracksuit. It took the Metropolitan Police, Greater London’s police force, forty-eight hours to find him and arrest him again, in Finsbury Park, north of the British capital.
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