The media-fuelled moral panic that erupted in October-November 2025 over the mistaken release of some prisoners, and the vicious targeting of foreign national or ‘illegal migrant’ prisoners who were among those released, have served to further compound the wave of far-right activity focused on terrorising the refugee community and trying to spread its racist influence amongst an increasingly impoverished and discontented working class.
Whilst sensationalising the mistaken release of some prisoners, the media was of course silent about the greater numbers of prisoners held unlawfully beyond their release dates. On 18 July the Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor issued an Urgent Notification to the Secretary of State for Justice after an inspection of Pentonville prison in north London, where a significant backlog in sentence calculation did mean that some prisoners were mistakenly being released earlier but also that a far greater number (130 in the six months preceding the inspection) were not released when they should have been.
As of October 2025, there were 87,413 people in prison in England and Wales and 8,363 in Scotland. Overall, the UK holds 139 prisoners per 100.000 of the total population – the highest figure in western Europe. The resultant mass overcrowding and increasing deterioration in conditions and regimes have resulted in a dysfunctional prison system close to collapse. The Labour government’s response has been to introduce some sticking plaster ‘reforms’ which will free up some places, and to build yet more prisons. Increasing parts of the prison system are being handed over to private corporations, firmly embedding a profit motive into continued expansion. The previous Labour government of Tony Blair massively increased the prison population, not in response to an increased level of crime, but to imitate the US system where prisons serve as a naked weapon against the most marginalised communities. The legacy of the ‘tough on crime’ Blair era is a prison system so overcrowded that it is unable to provide even the most basic of facilities, and where many prisons remain in a state of constant lockdown.
The ‘wrongly released’ foreign nationals demonised by the media were subject to this uproar in order to encourage support for the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s latest attacks on refugees and asylum seekers on 14 November. The prison and probation system in Britain is on the verge of collapse, yet these releases will now be used both to fuel state racism and to bolster the ‘law and order’ lobby, allowing the British capitalist establishment to herd yet more people into an increasingly repressive prison system.
John Bowden
