While headlines focus on a prisoner escaping London hospitals twice in one week, the real crisis lies in what happens after inmates are released. Britain's reoffending rate has exploded, with 121,058 proven reoffences recorded in the latest data — a staggering 61.9% surge from the 74,766 cases in 1933.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: for every dramatic hospital escape that makes the news, there are thousands of former prisoners quietly returning to crime after serving their sentences. The system designed to rehabilitate offenders is systematically failing.

The contrast is stark. Prison security failures grab front-page attention precisely because they're rare and shocking. But reoffending? That's become so routine it barely registers as news, even as the numbers climb relentlessly upward.

This isn't just about individual criminals making bad choices. The data reveals a justice system that has lost its way. Where rehabilitation programmes once showed promise, we now see a conveyor belt that processes offenders through prison and spits them back into society unchanged — or worse.

The timing couldn't be more telling. As child abuse cases become more complex to police, we're simultaneously failing to break the cycles that create repeat offenders. Each reoffence represents not just a failure of the individual, but a failure of the entire criminal justice pipeline.

What makes these numbers particularly damning is their persistence across decades and governments. This isn't a recent spike that can be blamed on austerity or COVID disruption. This is a fundamental breakdown that has been building since the 1930s, accelerating as our approach to criminal justice has shifted from rehabilitation toward punishment.

The public deserves to know that while ministers announce tougher sentences and promise more prison places, the evidence suggests we're simply creating a larger pool of future reoffenders. Every pound spent on prison capacity without addressing reoffending is money thrown into a black hole.

Prison escapes make for dramatic news because they represent an immediate, visible failure of the system. But the 121,000 proven reoffences represent something far more insidious: a justice system that has given up on its core mission of making society safer by actually changing criminal behaviour.

(Source: Ministry of Justice, Proven Reoffending -- proven-reoffending_jan24_mar24_3_monthly -- A7a_(3_monthly))