The prison service is suppressing evidence of widespread corruption among its own officers to conceal gaping flaws in security systems designed to prevent inmates from getting drugs, phones, and weapons, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.



Prison guards are themselves smuggling in the contraband, which is fuelling an explosion of violence behind bars, evidence from documents and whistleblowers has revealed. High-level insiders from across the prison system have accused authorities of failing to act on thousands of warnings about suspicious staff and instead burying the evidence.

The number of prison staff expelled or otherwise punished for corruption has almost doubled in the last five years, according to figures obtained by BuzzFeed News under freedom of information laws. But the government has refused to reveal the total number of internal corruption reports that were filed against officers in the same period, on the extraordinary basis that the information would show up “weaknesses in operational response” and could convince criminals that “risks were worth taking”.



However, BuzzFeed News has obtained a cache of internal documents and interviewed 32 insiders from more than 10 major prisons to piece together the scale of the problem the authorities are trying to keep under wraps.

Secret corruption reports from inside HMP Pentonville – where two prisoners recently broke free and nine inmates have been stabbed in the past eight weeks – reveal repeated warnings about corrupt officers trafficking drugs, colluding with escape attempts, and smuggling weapons at the high-security prison. One officer who remains at the prison today has kept his job despite “good” evidence that he was involved in drug trafficking, after investigating officers accidentally blew the identities of the whistleblowers who reported him, making it “unsafe” to pursue the case.

Officers, governors, security staff, inspectors, and former inmates told BuzzFeed News that acute staff shortages, low pay, and overcrowding in prisons had exposed major vulnerabilities to sophisticated criminal gangs targeting susceptible officers, and that swingeing funding cuts had left security teams woefully ill-equipped to tackle increasingly rampant corruption. They blamed the ready supply of hard drugs and weapons brought in by corrupt officers for the violence and rioting currently sweeping Britain’s jails.



Following a six-month investigation, BuzzFeed News can reveal:

Prisons across the country are being “flooded” with heroin, crack, and cannabis by officers working for criminals running drug trafficking rings from behind bars.

Officers at HMP Pentonville were accused of supplying guns and ammunition to dangerous convicts.

Britain’s largest prison, HMP Wandsworth, has been labelled “Carphone Warehouse” because of the variety of smartphones staff are selling for up to £1,500 a handset, allowing inmates to orchestrate smuggling operations and other criminal activities from inside their cells.

Administrative staff are allegedly taking bribes of around £5,000 a time to move dangerous inmates to lower-security prisons where drugs, mobiles, and other contraband can be brought in more easily.

Insiders say prison bosses are manipulating figures, turning a blind eye to serious allegations, and allowing staff caught smuggling drugs to move on to other jails in order to cover up the corruption in their own establishments.

Independent monitoring boards tasked with inspecting prisons in England and Wales are failing to investigate corruption and suppressing criticism of management.

Senior politicians called on the government to launch an independent public inquiry in response to the revelations by BuzzFeed News. Bob Neill, the chairman of the justice select committee, said the disclosures “expose very serious failures in the prison system” and demanded the “fullest possible investigation” by an inquiry overseen by an independent legal chair.

HMP Pentonville's local MP, Labour frontbencher Emily Thornberry, said the evidence uncovered by BuzzFeed News was "extremely disturbing" and accused the Ministry of Justice of "sticking its head in the sand". "This just confirms that, whether it is Pentonville or elsewhere, our prisons are now at breaking point," she said. "They are overcrowded, understaffed, plagued with corruption, and wide open to the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and mobile phones."



Lord Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, backed calls for a public inquiry and warned that government cuts had left prisons “hugely understaffed” and low pay needed to be “urgently examined”. “T​here has been an increase in violence on staff and that makes me wonder how anyone would be willing to undergo that sort of career for a starting salary of £24,700,” he said​. “The temptation to find other sources of income must be huge.​”​

The revelations come as the prison service faces its deepest crisis in decades, with staff and inmates in mutiny at the increasingly squalid and dangerous conditions behind bars. Around 10,000 officers walked out on strike last month after new figures revealed there had been 23,000 prison assaults in the past year, including 6,000 attacks on staff, and a 38% rise in violence involving weapons. HMP Bedford was overrun by riots in November, while HMP Pentonville was rocked by the escape of two inmates and a spate of stabbings, including a killing using a hunting knife, and inmates at several other prisons posted graphic images of drugs and violence on social media.

The justice secretary Liz Truss announced a £550 million bid to tackle the crisis last month, pledging to hire 2,500 more officers, revamp ageing jails, and install sophisticated “jamming equipment” to block the use of mobile phones. In addition, the Ministry of Justice said it planned to devise and implement a new strategy for tackling corruption in 2017.