Paper system at under fire prison is crazy, says MP

The pen and paper system at a prison where an asylum seeker was mistakenly released is "crazy", the local MP has said.

Hadush Kebatu was let out of HMP Chelmsford in October having been given a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Inspectors say the prison has since tightened up the process around freeing inmates.

Marie Goldman, the city's Liberal Democrat MP, met with prison bosses on Thursday and said she would do everything she could to get the prison an IT system to calculate release dates.

"This is the 21st Century and it still feels like they are working in the 19th Century," said Goldman, speaking to BBC Essex breakfast presenter Sonia Watson.

"They are still calculating [release dates and sentences] by hand with a pen and paper and an old fashioned school calculator to do those calculations.

"That creates all sorts of opportunities for mistakes to be made."

Last year, 91 prisoners were freed by mistake between April and October in England and Wales.

In November, Justice Secretary David Lammy said the government was investing up to £10m for new AI tools to reduce human error and upgrade the paper-based system.

Goldman continued: "I think if we work together, we can put together a system, it might even be a rough and ready system, but just a spreadsheet."

Prison staff told her that the current system meant staff could spend the whole day organising the books, she explained.

"This is a really simple thing that we can perhaps change."

Goldman said one of the changes the prison had made was putting bright paper inside the files of prisoners that should never be released.

"Those sort of things will make it really obvious to the staff and less easy for them to make mistakes," she said.

"We are all human and sometimes mistakes do get made but [the important thing] is understanding why those mistakes happen and how we can support staff to make sure they don't happen in the future."

The BBC has contacted the government for further comment.

Ethiopian migrant Kebatu sexually assaulted the girl in Epping in July, and the incident prompted repeated protests outside the Bell Hotel in the town - the asylum accommodation where he was staying.

Follow Essex news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.