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Organised criminal gangs who “corrupt” staff and enforce drug debts with violence hold such a huge influence over jails across England and Wales that it “keeps me awake at night”, the prisons minister has said.
James Timpson told the Guardian that Prison Service staff who worked with criminal gangs to smuggle drugs and contraband into jails were being targeted by a “beefed up” counter-corruption unit that last year prosecuted 37 officers.
His comments follow deepening concerns from prison watchdogs that criminal gangs are taking control of prisons – a claim Lord Timpson rejects. Criminologists have said the gangs are targeting and corrupting inexperienced officers.
Timpson said in an interview: “Serious organised crime is a big problem, a huge problem, and it’s one of the things that keeps me awake at night, because of the impact it has on a prison’s environment, from drugs, debt, violence and everything that goes with that.
“They [organised criminal gangs] corrupt both men and women to bring in drugs. And a lot of these serious organised criminals are in their cells at night, they’re actually very, very wealthy people and are connected with very big illegal businesses.”
Police and the National Crime Agency were working with the counter-corruption unit to identify connections between gangs and prison officers, he said, while HM Prison and Probation Service had funded 20 specialist police investigators.
He said: “The unit has been beefed up, and it needs to be, because it’s an increasing problem … Through our counter-corruption unit, we have found people who are bringing in drugs and contraband.”
Timpson, the former chief executive of Timpson Group, the retailer that provides key cutting and shoe repair services, was speaking as more than 30 companies, including Microsoft and Google, prepared to meet the government on Thursday to explore how technology could help monitor offenders in the community more effectively and tackle violence in prison.
Timpson said AI could be used to ease the heavy workload of probation officers who at present spend “so much time” duplicating data. “Technology can really impact what’s happening in prison, but most importantly in probation. You speak to some probation staff and they spend a lot of time finding housing for people, and when it fails, finding housing again,” he said.
Timpson took up his role at the Ministry of Justice last July last year, when the penal system in England and Wales was close to breaking point, and oversaw the early release of thousands of inmates to ease overcrowding and free up space.
A sentencing review conducted by the former justice secretary David Gauke is expected to recommend next week that more prisoners should be tagged and serve their sentences outside prison. However, the security company Serco, contracted by the government to manage tagging since October 2023, has been severely criticised after a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last month found that criminals were going untagged for months after their release.
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Timpson indicated he would not be withdrawing the contract. “What I’ve learned from doing this job is the procurement processes is well ingrained and long term, and it is pretty much what it is. I think it’s our job to keep pressure on, to call it out when it’s not right but to work with them to solve the problems that there are. Things have improved a lot, but I’m still not happy,” he said.
The Prison Service remained under pressure, he said, with fewer than 1,000 spare places and more than 88,000 people in custody in England and Wales.
Timpson said he was confident further emergency measures to combat prison overcrowding would not be needed this year.
He also said the government would have to spend £500m on dilapidated cells this year as it attempts to keep them in working order so they could receive offenders. “One of the problems is, when you go around, certainly the older Victorian prisons, there’s always this ongoing problem about losing cells because of various bits of dilapidation, and it costs a lot of money. That means we’re spending £500m at the moment on dilapidations and a lot of that is just keeping capacity there,” he said.
