Daniel Khalife’s escape lays wide open the woeful state of our prisons

Editorial: The suspected terrorist absconded from a squalid, overcrowded, understaffed prison with warders so inexperienced that prisoners have to tell them the rules. It’s time ministers got a grip

Cool, collected heads are needed to capture Khalife – and to keep him in confinement (PA)

There are three things that are invariably true about prison escapes. The first is that they are uncommon; the second is that most are planned with the help of accomplices; and the third is that they tend to capture the public imagination.

The case of the terror suspect Daniel Khalife is hardly The Shawshank Redemption, but it seems destined to stay in the headlines for weeks if not years to come, and his apparently audacious breakout has indeed become a focus of media and political attention. Soon, the clamour for a scapegoat – or just accountability – will begin, with the governor at Wandsworth prison, Katie Price, an obvious candidate.

An accidental consequence of this sensational story is that it has highlighted just how squalid conditions in the British prison system can be – and how far the prison service has been run down in recent years. As HM inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, explains in The Independent, chronic underinvestment in staffing means that prisoners at Wandsworth had to tell the inexperienced officers what they were supposed to be doing, clearly heightening the risk of escapes.