Editorial: Political row over mistakenly released sex offender Hadush Kebatu is a sideshow compared to the wider crisis in both immigration and prisons

A ridiculous row has flared up over how a migrant sex offender was mistakenly released from prison.

An Ethiopian national, Hadush Kebatu, was wrongly freed from HMP Chelmsford on Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre.​

The UK Justice Secretary told MPs yesterday that an independent inquiry will look at how to prevent further “rising” releases in error,

David Lammy say that Kebatu was set for deportation under an early removals scheme (ERS) for foreign national offenders, but was released into the community in “what appears to have been in human error”.

The migrant, who had been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex when he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman, later travelled to London and was arrested on Sunday morning in Finsbury Park after a two-day manhunt.

The row is ridiculous not because the incident was unimportant, but because it is a sideshow.

The issue is not what happened in this particular case. The issue is the wider crisis in both immigration and in prisons.

Liberal idiocy, presided over by the Tories for many years and made even worse by Labour over the last 15 months, led to a complete loss of control of immigration, not only illegal but legal. Meanwhile there are far too few prison spaces and far too soft sentences for serious crime.

Amidst this, a Labour government that is soft on crime suddenly fast-tracked the court processes to jail rioters after the Southport murders. That violence was disgraceful and totally unacceptable but the fury that underpinned the trouble was understandable.

The core facts are that deportations have been hopelessly few in number. And as the chief inspector of prisons says, prisoners being released early, in error or even late is an “endemic problem”.