A prolific burglar from Derby has gone missing from HMP Sudbury. Derbyshire Police say Larry Connors left the open prison at around 7:50 p.m. on Friday, October 18.
The 31-year-old had been moved to the category D prison while serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence.
Connors, 31, of Gisborne Green in the city centre, burgled houses across England, including Cambridgeshire, Chester, Kent, and London.
Connors, who had a penchant for jewellery, broke into multiple houses throughout 2021-2022, amassing spoils worth over £17,000. Having continuously left traces of his DNA, police were finally able to track him down and arrest him while he was sitting in a barber’s chair having a haircut in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire.
At the time of writing, Connors is still at large. He is described as being around 6ft 2ins tall, of a medium build, and with short ginger hair. Anyone with any information on his whereabouts is asked to contact Derbyshire Police.
If you’re unfamiliar with the UK’s prison system, you may wonder what an open prison is.
Essentially, the aim is to help inmates resettle and reintegrate into society as their sentence draws to a close.
Open prisons have less security and supervision than closed prisons and have fewer restrictions on prisoner movement. The incarcerated person probably won’t be kept in a cell all day or may even have a key to their cell. They may be able to participate in workshops inside the prison. Some inmates may even be given a Release on Temporary Licence—meaning they could take employment in the daytime outside of jail, returning in the evening.
Clearly, the system needs evaluating, however.
Larry Connors is not the first prisoner to abscond from an open prison, and it’s not even the first time for HMP Sudbury. In 2016, convicted murderer Darren Jackson, 51, sparked a nationwide manhunt after fleeing HMP Sudbury in Derbyshire after being moved there despite a documented history of attempted breakouts. In November 2022, four of its inmates managed to escape within a month of each other.
Elsewhere, sex offender Paul Robson, 56, walked out of HMP North Sea Camp in 2022, spending four days on the run before being arrested on Thursday in Skegness.
The MoJ revealed in 2020 that, since 2015, an estimated 631 inmates have absconded from open prisons across the UK.
While a hierarchy of security levels to fit the crime may sound reasonable, we must question the merit of sending a criminal to prison if they can more or less walk out whenever they like.
Generally, prisoners are reassessed to ensure they are in the correct category – once a year (for longer sentences) or every six months (for shorter ones). However, Category D prisoners in open prisons aren’t regularly reassessed unless their risk factors change. This needs to change.
Another possibility is to ensure prisoners transferred to an open prison are made to wear a leg tag with GPS tracking built in, effectively deterring them from absconding in the first place.
But these suggestions are merely band-aids on a gaping wound.
The British justice system is broken and needs a complete overhaul. Our prisons need to be more secure across the board. Stricter measures are needed to prevent prisoners from going AWOL, but also to control what enters the prison. Drugs and various other types of contraband are rampant, putting both prisoners and staff at risk.
The current sentencing guidelines are not working. They are designed to be lenient towards the more heinous crimes but stern towards political dissent.
Like you, the Homeland Party is sick of witnessing murderers and sex offenders receive paltry sentences, the full duration of which is often never served. We would ditch the overly soft approach shown by previous governments and ensure that sentences are proportional to the crime and balanced between punishment and rehabilitation.
We believe in freedom of speech and expression and would never weaponize the justice system to stifle political debate.
If you, like us, want a fair and functional justice system, join the Homeland Party and help us achieve it.
