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.

There are, obviously, no votes to be had in making prisoners’ lives easier, or even rehabilitating them. But the neglect has reached grotesque levels. It hardly needs to be pointed out right now that prisons are less secure – for inmates, officers and the public alike – if they are badly understaffed. Unfashionable as it may be, it’s worth pointing out that even those convicted of the most heinous of crimes are entitled to basic human rights; ensuring that conditions are austere but humane might even make running our overcrowded jails easier, and, ironically enough, result in their being rather less overrun by drug abuse and criminality.

Even now, it seems obvious that Khalife, though army-trained and resourceful, had some assistance, and no doubt police attention is turning towards associates on the inside and the outside. In the end, it may be intelligence rather than CCTV and the manhunt that leads to his re-arrest – but there is a risk that he will melt away and elude the authorities, The Jackal-style, for many years. Khalife is a dangerous man, and his actions ought not to be glamourised, whatever the temptation.

Given the well-documented, under-resourced state of the prisons system, it is surprising that there have not been more riots and breakouts in recent years. Yet only a handful of inmates have absconded, and Khalife is only the second person to have made it out of Wandsworth, apparently a slightly chaotic institution, since 2018.

However, Khalife’s escape is a serious matter, and the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, must publish the initial findings of the inquiry he’s ordered as soon as possible. He should resist any temptation to scapegoat prison officials, and should be open about the stresses that they are placed under, but equally, those who run Wandsworth and the prison service more widely do need to be made to answer for any mistakes that were made.

It would not necessarily be appropriate for the government to repeat the experience of 30 years ago, when the then home secretary Michael Howard was embroiled in a public row about whether he had forced the head of the prison service to quit after a series of high-profile escapes from HMP Parkhurst by IRA prisoners.

Cool, collected heads are needed to capture Khalife – and to keep him in confinement. Mr Chalk might also usefully take notice of Mr Taylor’s advice, close the Dickensian Wandsworth jail, and think about turning that valuable patch of real estate over to social housing.