One institution in whose dank confines the international drugs trade thrives is the British Prison Service. According to a detailed and damning report by the Metropolitan Police and the Prison Service’s own professional standards unit (PSU), drugs routinely change hands throughout the prison system for up to five times their street value. They are the chief commodity channelled to jail populations by corrupt prison staff who also sell mobile phones for up to £300 per handset and take substantial bribes for helping inmates to move to less secure facilities.
Prison corruption can seem a remote concern to the law-abiding majority. It is not. There is strong evidence, first, that it is endemic. Countering the claims of some governors and union officials who have consistently understated the problem, the report describes how every wing of every major closed prison typically has one trafficking member of staff to meet inmate demand. The identity of that trafficker may change over time, but the report insists that its estimate of more than 1,200 corrupt staff in the system is, if anything, conservative.
It is certainly alarming. Reliable data on corruption is necessarily scarce because those involved are often adept at hiding it. But even if a deep-seated culture of corruption in fact exists only in London’s prisons and seven other large institutions specified by the PSU, that culture is already undermining rehabilitation efforts and boosting recidivism rates for tens of thousands of prisoners. More broadly, it mocks a criminal justice system that has so far failed properly to acknowledge or confront it.
There is, to the contrary, little doubt that in the past the Prison Service has actually encouraged corruption by turning a blind eye to drug use in the belief that it made dangerous inmates easier to handle. More recently, policies of local recruitment and fostering good staff-inmate relations have created a pool of staff especially vulnerable to being “turned” by drug gangs — and by the prospect of doubling their annual pay with a few smuggled packages of heroin.
The Home Office responded yesterday to the PSU report by calling the existence of a culture of prison corruption “unlikely” while regretting that criminal collusion between staff and inmates was inevitable in the “closed world” of the jail system. Yet this world should not be closed, and Phil Wheatley’s first responsibility as the Director-General of the Prison Service is to be open about a problem that has taken six years to bring to light.
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His service should then incorporate explicit anti-corruption language into its codes of conduct; establish a new investigative body separate from the police; and institute new safeguards for whistle-blowers, who are particularly vulnerable to intimidation and much worse. Prison corruption is only “inevitable” if the potential gain for staff outweighs the risk. The gap between the two can and must be narrowed. Prisons will be safer as a result, and so will the communities outside them.