Your investigation showing that deaths within two weeks of release from prison have hit a record high (Report, 31 May) rightly identifies release into homelessness as a primary driver of deaths of ex-prisoners. I would add that the danger is concentrated in the first 72 hours after the gate closes behind you, and that the 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. Miss that appointment and the usual consequence is immediate recall back to prison. The figures you cite are not surprising to anyone who has been through it.
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. I know this because it happened to me. I was held on remand and then released from a court 40 miles from the prison and 30 miles from my home. My keys, my wallet and my phone were all at the prison or at home. Without family who were able to come and get me, I would have been, in every practical sense, set adrift at the precise moment the risk was highest.
James Stoddart
Project coordinator, The Oswin Project
Your report on record deaths within two weeks of prison release 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 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.
If the state cannot provide stable, affordable housing for those at their most vulnerable, what hope is there for anyone else? Without a serious shift in housing policy, these deaths risk becoming a preview of a wider public health disaster.
Richard Eltringham
Leicester
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