Eight prison staff have been suspended over allegations that they goaded Muslim inmates until they needed to be restrained and then “kept score” in a group text message.
The officers from HMP Nottingham are said to have focused on black and Asian prisoners, although it is alleged that white inmates who had converted to Islam or who were drug addicts were also targeted.
Points were awarded via a group on the messaging service WhatsApp, it is alleged, with the highest scores available for restraining converts. Betting is thought to have taken place based on the points total. A police investigation is under way.
One source said: “The officers are said to have engineered a confrontation so they could have reason to restrain inmates. The language they are said to have used was vile.”
The category B jail holds 1,060 adult and young adult male prisoners. Latest figures showed that about 8.5 per cent of its inmates were black, 5.5 per cent Asian and 5 per cent of mixed ethnicity. There were about 90 Muslim prisoners in the jail earlier this year.
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A report by the Independent Monitoring Board this year said that the procedure for reporting incidents of discrimination at HMP Nottingham was not operational in the eight months leading up to November last year. It said this seemed to indicate that the “prison’s priorities were elsewhere”.
A Prison Service spokesman said: “Eight members of staff have been suspended from active duty at HMP Nottingham. There is an ongoing police investigation into this matter, therefore it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
Separate figures show that almost 60 firearms, including guns, replica firearms, toys mimicking firearms and chemical incapacitant sprays, were found in prisons in England and Wales between 2005 and 2014.
The figures were revealed to the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) by the Ministry of Justice after a freedom of information request. The figures did not show in which prisons the “weapons” had been found or in what areas of jails they were discovered.
Guns have been used in escapes in the past, including by IRA suspects. Nessan Quinlivan and Pearse McAuley escaped while on remand at Brixton prison in 1991 using a gun that had been hidden in the sole of a shoe.
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Five IRA men and an armed robber fled from a secure unit at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire in 1994. Unarmed guards overpowered them.
Iain Overton, the director of AOAV, said: “Given that the UK is relatively spared from the gun violence that we see, for instance, in the US, a surprising number of guns seem to have found their way into HM prisons.”