Criminal gangs are infiltrating the prison service to smuggle contraband such as drugs into jails, a senior police officer revealed yesterday.

Assistant Chief Constable Jason Hogg, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on prison intelligence, fears organised criminals are asking associates or family members to secure jobs with the intention of sneaking illegal items behind bars.

He ‘strongly suspects’ gangs are infiltrating the prison service, but explained it was difficult to prove.

‘There are some examples of staff, very soon after they work in that prison estate, whether it’s as a prison officer or a maintenance worker, if you like, they move towards supplying contraband,’ Mr Hogg told the BBC.

Assistant Chief Constable Jason Hogg ‘strongly suspects’ gangs are infiltrating the prison service, but explained it was difficult to prove

And Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers Association, said it was ‘very easy’ to traffic drugs and other illicit items into prisons, with officers rarely searched.

‘We have got intelligence to suggest people – prison officers and civilian staff – have been targeted and recruited by criminal gangs to get drugs into prisons,’ he said.

Prisoners to get cheap call rates from their cells BT will charge prisoners less to make calls from their cells than they charge ordinary customers to call the same number, under a controversial scheme. A deal will see BT provide private phones for prisoners. The £10million scheme will see the cost of prisoners’ calls to loved ones’ landlines drop to as little as 8p per minute. On BT’s standard tariff, a landline-to-landline call can cost up to 15p a minute. Calls to mobiles will cost convicts 18p per minute, the same as BT’s standard rate. The scheme is part of a radical shake-up by Justice Secretary David Gauke to help rehabilitate offenders. Landlines will be installed in 50 jails by March 2020, then extended to all 118 prisons in England. Lord Keen, the Government’s justice spokesman in the House of Lords, said the prison service was ‘keen to make calls as reasonable as is possible and is therefore working on a programme to extend availability of in-cell telephony...’ Advertisement

‘It’s very rare. Less than 1 per cent of our staff are corrupt, but it does happen.’ Last year, prison officer Paul Heap, 43, was jailed for nine years for smuggling £215,000 worth of crack cocaine, heroin and steroid tablets in juice cartons into HMP Altcourse, Liverpool.

In November, Ibrahim Hussain, 20, was sentenced to three years and four months imprisonment after a package containing cannabis, a knife and mobile phones was found in his uniform as he entered HMP Peterborough.

Mr Fairhurst explained how someone with no criminal record, but with links to a crook, is able to get through the recruitment process to join the prison service – and called for a better vetting system, similar to that used by the police.

He also urged the Government to recruit more prison staff and said everyone coming in and out of jails should be searched.

Prisons Minister Rory Stewart told the BBC: ‘Searching, not just in terms of finding a bad apple, but also if you have very good search procedures in place, it’s much more difficult for a prisoner to put pressure on a prison officer.’

An X-ray body scanner has been trialled at HMP Leeds, one of ten prisons identified for improvement in a £10million blitz.