A prisoner escaping from London hospitals twice in a week grabs headlines. But for every dramatic breakout that makes the news, there are hundreds of offenders who never needed to break out — because the system keeps letting them back in.

Take someone convicted of theft in Manchester in 2023. They serve their sentence, get released, then steal again within two years. They're now part of a cohort that's exploded in size: 1,031 proven reoffenders tracked in the latest Ministry of Justice data, compared to just 483 three years earlier.

That's not a gradual increase. It's a 113.5% surge in people cycling back through the courts — the kind of jump that suggests something fundamental broke in Britain's approach to rehabilitation between 2023 and now. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Proven Reoffending -- proven-reoffending_jan24_mar24_annual -- A4a_(annual_average))

The timing matters. These aren't legacy cases from austerity cuts or COVID disruption. These are people who committed their original offences when the economy was supposedly recovering, when "levelling up" was government policy, when rehabilitation programmes were meant to be back on track.

Instead, we built a revolving door so effective that prison escapes barely register as a problem. Why break out when you know you'll be back anyway?

The Manchester thief becomes part of a pattern now visible across England and Wales. The burglar in Birmingham who can't find steady work. The drug dealer in Cardiff whose treatment programme got cut. The fraudster in Newcastle whose probation officer has a caseload too heavy to manage properly.

Each reoffence ripples outward. Another victim. Another court date. Another cell occupied. Another family watching someone they love disappear back into a system that's forgotten how to help people stay out.

Politicians love talking tough on crime when someone escapes from Pentonville or breaches bail conditions. But this data reveals the escape they're not talking about: people escaping any real chance of rehabilitation, locked into cycles that make reoffending almost inevitable.

The numbers suggest we're not just failing to rehabilitate criminals — we're actively creating more of them. Every person who cycles back through the system represents money wasted, communities made less safe, and families torn apart again.

While news crews camp outside hospitals waiting for the next dramatic breakout, more than a thousand proven reoffenders are already planning their next crime. They don't need to escape prison. Prison already failed to hold onto them where it mattered most: in their heads, in their habits, in their hope for something different.

That's the real escape story. And it's happening in every constituency in Britain.