AI solutions for UK prison problems

On Tuesday 11 November, deputy PM David Lammy unveiled a new plan to crack down on mistaken prison releases. We shit you not, the proposal is to set up a court hotline and to use an AI checker. What could possibly go wrong?

‘New guardrails’

According to government figures, prisons mistakenly released 91 individuals between April and October 2025. Lammy, also acting as the current justice secretary, insists that Labour inherited this “crisis” from the Tories. The data reflects this assertion, with the rising trend beginning back in 2021. However, the number of accidental releases has seen a sharp uptick this year.

In a Commons address yesterday, Lammy announced that he plans to plough £10m into tackling such errors. This will be used in part to speed up the modernisation of paper record-keeping in prisons. Lammy will also invest these funds to roll out new AI sentence-calculation systems for prison staffers.

The deputy PM said:

The first duty of any Government is to keep the public safe. The rise in releases in error is one symptom of a service under intolerable strain.

We are putting in new guardrails around an archaic system, with tougher new checks, reviewing specific failings and modernising prison processes and joint working with courts – all to bear down on the increase in mistakes.

That is what victims deserve. That is what the public expects, and this Government will do what it takes to protect the public.

As if ‘get an AI to help’ didn’t already sound dodgy enough, don’t worry: it gets worse. The AI proposition was apparently cooked up after a specialist team was sent into HMP Wandsworth just last week, after a pair of high-profile mistaken releases.

‘Quick fixes’

James Timpson, minister for prisons and parole, told the House of Lords on Monday that the specialist team were looking for “some quick fixes”. He further stated:

We had the AI team that went in and, to give you a couple of examples, they think an AI chatbot would be really helpful, and also a cross-referencing for aliases, because we know some offenders have more than 20 aliases.

So, to get this straight, the government sent in AI specialists to patch-up a broken system. Then, surprise surprise, the specialists recommended AI tools. The Guardian reported that the AI systems could also be used to scan hundreds of pages of paper documents, merge datasets, and calculate sentence times.

AI, the tech world’s new annoying buzzword of the year, offers a veneer of robotic neutrality, efficiency, and modern infallibility. However, the mistakes that AI tools make, as new industries adopt them, have often prove both costly and severe.

Likewise, AI can also serve to automate and exacerbate pre-existing racial biases. This is because of the biases present in their training datasets. In fact, mere days ago the Met police released a report which stated that:

Policing technology is not race-neutral. When the Met adopts facial recognition, risk scoring, or automated decision-making tools, it does not begin from scratch. It begins with data, data shaped by decades of racialised enforcement. What appears as innovation is often the acceleration of inherited harm.

How about a committee?

The justice secretary plans to spend the £10m rapidly over the next six months. This will fund the deployment of more of the “new digital crack teams” to hunt error-making in prisons (or generate errors, as the case may be). The government’s website also states that it will use the money to:

Create a new monthly Justice Performance Board, which the deputy PM will chair. This will track how prisons and courts are performing. The board, which they claim will be “laser-focussed on addressing key metrics”, will continue to meet until the situation improves.
Establish a dedicated data team to “review historic cases and understand systematic issues” for Dame Lynne Owen’s independent review of prison release errors.
Simplify policies on releasing prisoners, and standardise the treatment of different cases.
Put in place a “fast-track” courts hotline. This will allow prison staff to quickly check for outstanding warrants before releasing prisoners. Likewise, court staff will now need to confirm orders verbally with judges before they can finalise them.

That last bullet point is something that should have existed already. ‘Hey, maybe we should have an easy way to check for warrants before letting someone go’. But hey, what do we know?

Separately to this £10m cash injection, Labour is planning to build an extra 14,000 prison places. It also intends to overhaul sentencing, for the purpose of:

mak[ing] sure we have enough prison places to lock up dangerous criminals and keep the public safe.

Given that prisons are already stretched to breaking point, and there aren’t enough staff to process case papers, you might think that employing more staff rather than prison places would be a reasonable, commonsense fix. Don’t be silly. The solution is a new monthly committee meeting, AI chatbots, and AI chatbot salesmen.

Kudos to whichever intern came up with ‘maybe we could also ring up and check?’ though. Consider applying for a raise.

Featured image via the Canary