James Stoddart, project coordinator at The Oswin Project, responds to an investigation showing that deaths within two weeks of leaving prison have hit a record high. He says the danger is concentrated in the first 72 hours after release, and that failures which kill people in that window are often astonishingly basic. People are routinely released without housing, medication, identification or a bank account, and sometimes without a clear idea of when or where their first probation appointment is. Missing that appointment usually leads to immediate recall to prison.
Stoddart notes that this is most acute for the large number of people held on remand, who can be released straight from court with no resettlement support at all. He writes from personal experience: he was held on remand and then released from a court 40 miles from the prison and 30 miles from his home. His keys, wallet and phone were all at the prison or at home. Without family who were able to come and get him, he would have been, in every practical sense, set adrift at the precise moment the risk was highest.
Richard Eltringham of Leicester says the report exposes a government still pretending that this is a criminal justice problem rather than a housing one. With 77 people dying within two weeks of release in 2025, a sharp rise on the previous year, experts again point to homelessness as the decisive factor. But Eltringham argues that this crisis is not confined to people leaving custody. When ministers and major housebuilders persist in producing car-dependent estates with two-hourly buses to hollowed-out towns, while failing to build homes that people can actually afford, they are creating the same lethal conditions for young people who have never been near a prison gate.
Eltringham concludes that if the state cannot provide stable, affordable housing for those at their most vulnerable, there is little hope for anyone else. Without a serious shift in housing policy, these deaths risk becoming a preview of a wider public health disaster.
