The Bordeaux prison, also known as the Montreal Detention Centre is seen in Laval, Quebec, in January, 2023.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
Lorna Poplak is the author of On the Lam: Great (and Not So Great) Escapes from Prison.
During the last week of October, a grim comedy of errors played out in the United Kingdom.
Instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre, Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender, was mistakenly released from a prison in Chelmsford. According to an eyewitness, the confused man, clad in a grey prison-issue tracksuit and clutching his possessions in a plastic bag, tried to re-enter the prison several times after being released. He was turned away by prison staff, who directed him to the railway station. By the time the authorities became aware of their blunder, he was well on his way to London.
The snafu was particularly galling, as Mr. Kebatu’s arrest over the summer for sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl had ignited a political storm, with right-wing protesters targeting the asylum hotel in Epping, Essex, where he had been staying.
After an intense 48-hour manhunt, Mr. Kebatu was located and taken into custody. In the correctional equivalent of sweeping the problem under the rug, he was given what was called a “discretionary payment” of £500 and deported.
But the problem stubbornly refused to go away.
Within days, there were reports of two more accidental releases, this time from a prison in London. Even more concerning was a recent report that the number of prisoners released in error had more than doubled between April, 2024 and March, 2025, 262 as compared to 115 in the previous year.
U.K. Justice Secretary David Lammy under fire after two more inmates mistakenly released
There are striking similarities between the Kebatu debacle and a situation that unfolded in Quebec in 2017. Goi Hing Leung had been accused in November, 2015 of brutally attacking a homeless man in an alleyway in Montreal’s Chinatown. He faced a charge of attempted murder. In March, 2017, while incarcerated in the Montreal Detention Centre pending trial, Mr. Goi was mistakenly set free. Despite his repeated efforts – as well as those of his lawyer and representatives of the Crown – prison authorities categorically refused to take him back. They yielded only when Mr. Goi’s return to the institution was ordered by a judge. The judge commended Mr. Goi on his honesty. He was not, however, granted bail and was later found guilty as charged.
This was hardly an isolated case.
In 2023, The Globe and Mail received a whopping 384 pages of unredacted incident reports from the Quebec Ministry of Public Security. Realizing its error, the ministry asked The Globe to destroy the originals and replaced them with redacted versions. Even redacted, the documents exposed deep fault lines in Quebec’s correctional system. More than 200 inmates, among them violent offenders, had been improperly released from Quebec provincial jails between 2015 and 2022. The details were damning: court officials, police, and correctional officers mixed up names, miscalculated sentences, confused release dates, and failed to communicate adequately.
For the most part, the released inmates were rearrested within hours. However, as contact details for offenders and their relatives were often incorrect, it sometimes took weeks or months to rectify the mistakes. Corrections staff struggled with their workloads: in one case, a premature release was occasioned by the sheer volume of e-mailed documents three sentence management officers were obliged to plow through; in another an inmate was set free when “a recurring problem with the Outlook messaging system” led to a delay in transmitting vital documents.
Jurisdictions in other parts of Canada have also fared poorly. In Ontario, documents obtained through a freedom of information request in 2010 revealed that at least 143 offenders were mistakenly released from provincial correctional facilities between 2003 and 2009. The documents were heavily censored. Details such as the age of the offenders or the nature of their crime were stripped out, as was the length of time they had been at large. It was divulged, however, that releases were generally the result of human error, technical error, or situations where one inmate took on the identity of another. Between 2009 and 2013, another 98 inmates were prematurely set free. Here, more details were made available: four of the inmates, for example, had been convicted of serious crimes.
In most of the provinces, information regarding premature releases is often kept frustratingly secret. Nova Scotia stands out as the open and transparent exception: the Department of Justice offers public updates on reportable incidents involving individuals in its custody.
The situation is just as murky on the federal level. In April, 2024, a Conservative MP probed the record of Correctional Service Canada (CSC) in the House of Commons. Among the questions were how many inmates had been mistakenly released from federal institutions since 2016, including the reason for each mistaken release, the number of released offenders, and whether the inmates were classified as dangerous offenders. The response from a Liberal government spokesperson was that “CSC has strict safeguards to prevent such incidents,” followed by a detailed outline of the various processes in place to ensure the smooth discharge of inmates.
Despite those purportedly strict safeguards, mishaps continue. Although only a small percentage of inmates are mistakenly released in Canada, the fact that dangerous offenders are part of the mix has alarmed the public and stoked political controversy. In the wake of Britain’s calamitous week, the justice secretary promised “immediate measures to strengthen release checks across all prisons.” Canada would do well to follow that example.