Opening a rare window on the security and crime prevention inside prisons, Claudia Sturt of HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) gave to this afternoon’s part of the four-day International Security Week what she admitted was a ‘bleak analysis’. As she set out, prison is no longer the end goal and success for the criminal justice system; for new tech allows criminals to carry on crime while in custody.
She’s been the executive director, security, order and counter-terrorism for HMPPS for four years; she began he talk by noting she was responsible ‘for everything that goes wrong in prisons, and it’s a wide remit’. She described crime in and around prisons as ‘chronic’ – ‘that isn’t a UK-specific phenomenon; as the world becomes more networked, so does crime’.
Until recently, as she recalled, prisons were an ‘analogue environment’; prisoners communicated by landline telephone and physical letters; news came in by television and newspaper; prisoners and and groups had limited scope for crime there. In the last ten to 15 years, she went on, new technology has permeated through the prison walls: “We have a generation of prisoners who have grown up with smart phones and social media and are adept at using technology to augment their criminality.”
Organised crime groups (OCGs) especially can maintain their outside enterprises from inside prison, she said. Equally, mobile tech allows those who seek to deal drugs or sell mobile phones in prison to have more effective ways. With a basic smartphone, you can organise a drug shipment, by drone, and have it directed to you by GPS signal, and manage the payment and launder the proceeds. Such OCG crime while in prison is ‘highly harmful and evolving’, she said. We know, she went on, that new criminal networks are formed while in custody that would not have been formed otherwise (because when free the groups would have been in competing markets). Criminals in prison will put their differences aside, ‘for the duration’ and even create temporary OCGs, ‘to make the best of their situation’.
As she pointed out, a prison has to be safe and stable for it to carry out rehabilitation of offenders, the purpose of a prison. Only a ‘small minority’ of prisons have the equipment and staff to regularly search to a standard similar to airports. The consequences are profound, she said; serious and organised (SOC) offenders continue to operate their criminal enterprises while inside, ‘and pursuing highly profitable markets for illicit drugs and mobile phones’.
Drug finds in prison are rising, she reported, and upwards of 20,000 illicit phones and sim cards are recovered from prison in a year; and some 7000 reports of corruption.
As for contraband, the obvious way in is through the prison gate; but also over the perimeter, in vehicles, through the post and incoming property; and by visitors: “Where there is a will there is a way.” She admitted prisons would never be completely free to drugs and phones and even weapons entering; and a security capability was needed to deal with a residual threat. Besides, it was crucial that prisons share intelligence with police, about extremist and SOC activity.
The background as she stated was an ageing prison estate, and an anticipated increase in the prison population: we have to double down on our efforts and capability, else prison security might continue to fall further behind, she warned; ‘we don’t want to undo the good work law enforcement has done in taking the most harmful people off the streets’.
For part two, law enforcement response, click here.
Photo by Mark Rowe; Maidstone Prison outside wall, Kent.
