Prisons: Weapons
(asked on 9th December 2022) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) firearms, (b) bladed items and (c) other weapons have been found in prisons in each of the last five years.
We publish the number of incidents where weapons were found in prison in England and Wales in the HMPPS Annual Digest, the latest issue covering the period from April 2021 to March 2022. HMPPS also records the category of weapons found during these incidents:
Year | Total weapon finds | Blunt instrument | Firearms | Knife/bladed article | Other weapon |
2017-18 | 7,157 | 1,145 | 15 | 4,089 | 2,130 |
2018-19 | 9,722 | 1,789 | 21 | 5,322 | 2,834 |
2019-20 | 11,267 | 2,164 | 21 | 6,285 | 3,028 |
2020-21 | 7,178 | 1,599 | 16 | 3,753 | 1,969 |
2021-22 | 8,057 | 1,951 | 26 | 3,994 | 2,299 |
Data Sources and Quality
These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.
Incidents where weapons were found in prison custody can include finds of multiple weapons; the figures in the table count the number of incidents where a weapon was found rather than the number of weapons.
One incident can also include multiple types of weapons, so the sum of the individual types can exceed the total number of incidents. This also means that blunt instrument find incidents, which are a separate type, cannot be added into 'other weapon' find incidents without risk of double-counting some incidents.