Pete Doherty Released From Jail 70 Days Early

Pete Doherty’s prison adventure has been cut dramatically short - not by a horrific stabbing injury as some had hoped, but by early release.

Released less than a month into his 14-week jail sentence, Pete Doherty is now a free man once again, much like Ronnie Barker from Going Straight except a bit less funny and/or dead.

Still, even 29 days in jail is long enough for someone to become institutionalised, which means in the next few days you might see pictures of Pete Doherty stumbling around looking a bit confused and unwashed. Don’t worry if you do - it means he’s completely back to normal. Thanks folks, we’re here all week.

By our understanding, Pete Doherty being sent to jail for 14 weeks meant that he’d be released on July 15. But Pete Doherty has been released and it’s not anywhere near July 15 yet. It had better not be, anyway, because if it was, that’d make tomorrow St Gondulphus’ day, and we haven’t even started making our traditional anti-Gondulphus hate banner yet. Talk about an oversight!

But anyway, back to Pete Doherty. You might not have realised it, since the dreary trickle of stories about him hasn’t dried up at all, but Pete Doherty has been in jail for the last 29 days. And this morning he was released, a full 70 days earlier than he was supposed to.

Nobody really knows why Pete Doherty got such an early release from prison - although hopefully it was because wardens caught him writing more rubbish prison poetry and chucked him out before he had enough to turn it into an actual book - but Pete knows one thing, and that’s he’s not having any of this jail cell heroin addiction talk. The NME quotes:

“I managed to stay clean. I got my certificate. I was going to Sellotape it to the wall, but they wouldn’t give me any Sellotape. Did I take heroin inside? Complete rubbish. The prison didn’t release statements – it’s their policy to ignore it rather than acknowledge it [media reports]. I was in segregation for the last three weeks. The call it the block. Supposedly I was in debt to loads of big time drug dealers. All I’ll say to that is: chance would be a fine thing.”

And if Pete Doherty didn’t take any heroin in jail, perhaps we can effectively rule out any other stereotypical prison behaviour from his as well. Maybe Pete didn’t get any tattoos, maybe he didn’t nurture an injured bird back to health, maybe he wasn’t anally brutalised in a washroom at any point, and maybe he didn’t learn his lesson and vow never to reoffend ever again. Who knows?

All that we can be sure of is that Pete Doherty is a free man, and he’d be wise to use this extra time to get his life back in order as quickly as possible. Unless or course that involves making a new album or singing in public again. If that’s the case, maybe he should consider getting back into a self-destructive spiral of drug abuse or something instead.

Read more:

Pete Doherty: ‘I stayed clean in prison’ - NME