Prisoners rejoice after catalogue of mix-ups in the penal system

For the second time in four months, Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, has been faced with claims of presiding over a shambolic penal system and the political embarrassment of prisoners enjoying the prospect of getting out of jail "early".

The notion of "early" is wrong. Yesterday's High Court ruling means that, as a matter of law, thousands of inmates on concurrent sentences had their terms fixed too long.

But the issue flowed directly from the fiasco in August, when 541 inmates were wrongly released early following Prison Service instructions that criminals serving consecutive sentences should have time spent on remand taken off each term, not just one.

Mr Howard speedily and successfully challenged that in the courts, but by then none of the 541 could be recalled and a number soon reoffended.

Four earlier High Court rulings on the application of the 1967 Criminal Justice Act to concurrent sentences, the first in 1982, had prompted Prison Service lawyers to recommend the controversial scheme for consecutive- sentence prisoners. But the earlier rulings were declared wrongly decided by the court yesterday.

Echoing what the man and woman in the street might have thought, the judges said: "It has in our experience been the practice to assume that all periods of custody before sentence, other than custody wholly unrelated to the offences for which sentence is passed, will count against the period of sentence to be served."

Anticipating yesterday's defeat, the Prison Service ordered governors to press ahead with a recalculation exercise a fortnight ago and, in contrast to the August debacle, said it had made arrangements to alert the probation service.

Ann Widdecombe, the minister for prisons, said in a statement that the Prison Service would be examining the sentencing records of all 58,000 prisoners in 135 jails in England and Wales.

She said "early indications" were that 800 serving prisoners would be affected by the change, with about 50 eligible for imminent release when sentence calculations had been completed.

But the figures were disputed as under estimates by the National Association of Probation Officers, which said its own inquiries had revealed that up to four prisons alone might each have 20 prisoners who qualified for immediate release, making a possible total of between 70 and 150. The association also estimates that between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners will qualify to have their sentences recalculated.

Several more thousand prisoners released over the past decade will now qualify to claim compensation for unlawful imprisonment, subject to a statutory limit on bringing claims of six years.

Harry Fletcher, the association's assistant general secretary, suggested the total value of potential claims could reach pounds 18m, based on an average amount of unlawful custody of five to six weeks and a pro rata compensation rate of pounds 25,000 a year.

Imran Khan, solicitor for Paul Reid, one of the two freed yesterday, said: "I would advise all prisoners to consider carefully whether this decision could apply to them. They may well be entitled to compensation." Stephen Shaw, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "The decision is not about prisoners getting a bonus or reward. It is about correcting a long-standing unfairness."

The judges highlighted some of the injustices yesterday in references to the four earlier decisions. In one case the applicant had had to serve a year longer than his equally guilty co-defendant; in another, the fact that the applicant had spent no time in custody for one of her many offences meant she was deprived of the benefit of the time she had spent on remand on all the others.

Paul Cavadino, chairman of the Penal Affairs Consortium, said: "Today's judgment does not mean that remand periods will be counted more than once. The grievance of the prisoners who brought this case was that some of their remand time had not been counted towards their sentences at all as a result of a misapplication of the law."

The court refused leave for Mr Howard to go to the House of Lords.