Prisons: Disciplinary Proceedings

(asked on 19th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison staff have been disciplined for bringing contraband into prisons by role in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Robert Buckland Portrait
Robert Buckland
This question was answered on 27th June 2019

HMPPS is committed to investigating and eliminating corruption to ensure prisons remain a safe and secure environment for staff, prisoners and visitors.

There are over 46,000 people working in the Prison and Probation Service and the vast majority are dedicated and hard-working. However, when we do find evidence of wrongdoing by staff we do not hesitate to take firm disciplinary action.

We have invested heavily in security measures to prevent contraband entering the estate. This includes training more than 300 sniffer dogs, rolling out scanners and transforming our intelligence capabilities. We have also built up our ability to work with law enforcement to disrupt criminal networks. We use body searches and staff can be subject to intelligence-based searches at any time.

Table 1: Total number of HMPPS prison staff1 disciplined2 for bringing contraband into prisons3, by role, for the years 2013/14 to 2017/18

Role

2013/14

2014/15

2015/16

2016/17

2017/18

Bands 6-8 / Managers

0

~

~

0

0

Band 3-54 Prison Officers

19

7

3

7

3

Band 2 / Operational Support

7

4

4

0

~

Band 3 / Administrative Officer

~

~

~

0

0

Other Admin

0

~

0

0

~

Instructional Officer

0

0

~

0

~

Psychology

~

0

0

~

0

Industrial / Facilities

0

~

0

3

4

Other and Unknown Grades

~

0

0

~

0

Total

29

14

9

11

11

Notes:
1. Staff subject to at least one conduct and discipline that was concluded during the year

2. Conduct and discipline cases are defined as where a penalty has been imposed on a member of HMPPS staff for a reason of conduct


3. Contraband is considered to be any prohibited good trafficked into the prison by a member of staff

4. Includes Band 3-4 / Prison Officer (incl. specialists), Band 4 / Supervising Officer and Band 5 / Custodial Managers


~ denotes suppressed values of 2 or fewer, or other values which would allow values of 2 or fewer to be derived by subtraction. In some instances, zeroes have also been suppressed in order to ensure that low numbers cannot be calculated

Low numbers are suppressed to prevent disclosure in accordance with the Data Protection Act, 1998




As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. However, the database itself is dynamic and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate.

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