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Changes after Qld prisoner release bungles

Bureaucratic bungling led to almost 100 Queensland prisoners being released early, a report by the Queensland Audit Office has found

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Source: AAP


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A lack of communication between corrections agencies led to one prisoner being accidentally released from jail more than two-and-a-half years early, a report into errors in sentencing enforcement has found.

The Queensland Audit Office report found 238 prisoners were kept in custody longer than their sentence during the past 11 years, while 91 were incorrectly released before their sentence was finished.

In one case a prisoner was released 968 days early during the July 2009 - January 2010 period, although they spent only 35 days at large before being brought back to jail.

Of the cases identified, on average prisoners were released 51 days earlier than they should have been, while prisoners were kept in custody an average of 15 days longer than they should have been.

The report, released on Tuesday, identified communication issues between the various corrections agencies as the overwhelming cause of the errors, and also found that those errors were increasing in frequency.

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It also found workload pressures were seeing staff saddled with more cases to process, and training regimes varied widely across agencies.

In response to the report the state government has announced the re-establishment of the Lawful Detention Expert Reference Group to provide more co-ordination between corrections agencies.

Corrections Minister Mark Ryan said less than one per cent of prisoner sentences were served with administrative error.

"As minister, I consider any error to be unacceptable and I will be speaking with the QCS commissioner about reducing this number even further," Mr Ryan said in a statement.


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