One prison officer said it was easier to buy heroin inside Brixton prison
than it was outside Brixton McDonald’s.
One of Britain’s biggest prisons
was actually known inside as “Carphone Warehouse”
because it was so easy to get hold of mobile phones in there.
My investigation revealed how a corruption epidemic
inside the prison walls of every prison in the UK
was being kept a secret by the UK government.
Britain’s entire prison system was riddled from top to bottom
with corruption.
A system that is supposed to rehabilitate
was doing the exact opposite of what it was in place to do.
[Investigators]
My name’s Heidi Blake,
and I’m an investigative reporter
and editor at BuzzFeed News.
Richard was a very young reporter.
He was fresh out of university,
and we’d originally hired him as an intern.
And he came bouncing into the office one day with this idea for a story.
My name is Richard Holmes
and I’m an investigative reporter
at BuzzFeed News.
During this time, there was a lot of interest in prisons.
Everyone was talking about drugs coming into prisons,
and there was a lot of reports about drones
and very complex methods of getting drugs into prisons.
But no one was really talking about an obvious route,
which I thought would be the most popular,
which is corrupt staff.
So I decided to use a tool that’s very useful for journalists
and members of the public, which is freedom of information.
But the government refused to disclose how many corruption reports
had been filed against prison officers
and how many of those had actually been acted upon,
because to do so would show weaknesses
in their ability to respond to corruption,
which might actually encourage criminals
to try to corrupt prison officers.
And that was when we thought,
“Wow, bingo. We’re really onto something here.”
I was never in any doubt that there were drugs
or mobile phones inside prisons.
The prisoners themselves were posting selfies,
holding drugs or smoking drugs.
And there was a whole swath of social media accounts
that were run by prisoners inside prisons.
There were two sets of documents throughout the reporting stage.
One was a large batch of security information reports
coming out of Pentonville Prison
that an interested party had felt the need to share with me.
That was the first time when I had actually ever received a leak.
The documents were full of really eye-popping details
about the kind of corruption that was going on inside prisons.
Allegations of prison officers supplying prisoners with heroin
and other hard drugs, cocaine, crack.
There were allegations that prison officers
were assisting prisoners with escape attempts
by either supplying them with prison guard uniforms to help them get out
or arranging hospital visits where it's much easier for them to escape
because there’s lower security.
Reports of prison officers having sexual relations with prisoners.
And there were even several reports of prison officers
bringing in weaponry and ammunition.
These documents show that Britain’s entire prison system
was riddled from top to bottom with corruption,
and that the governors and the independent monitors
who were in charge of stamping out that kind of corruption
were totally failing to do anything to stop it.
The majority of people in the prison system didn’t want to talk to me.
When you join the prison system,
you have to sign the Official Secrets Act,
which makes it a criminal offense
to reveal sensitive information about your place of work.
But there were individuals
who were overly concerned about this very issue.
The main corruption I saw personally was a huge amount of drugs, alcohol.
When you find fruit
which has been injected with large quantities of vodka,
there’s only one way that’s come in.
I went to Heidi and sort of said, you know,
“I’ve spoken to one.
I’ve got one to speak to me, and they’ve told me X, Y and Z.”
And I’d be like, “Great, go and find another ten prison officers,
and I want an inmate as well.”
I managed to get to speak to 32 insiders
from over ten prisons across the UK.
There’s two main points in this story,
and that’s the initial corruption
that’s being undertaken by the prison officers.
But the bigger systemic issue, in my opinion,
is the fact that this corruption is not being reported properly.
I did a security information report
on information that I received about an officer dealing drugs.
And then I found myself in front of the governor,
explaining why I’ve submitted that report.
I felt quite undermined by that action.
Because they’re behind a big wall,
very rarely do you hear anything about it.
It’s covered up in many different ways.
It started to make sense to me
that there was a real systemic problem
with reporting corruption inside prisons.
And it was it was pretty shocking, to be honest with you.
The documents showed that prison officers
had all kinds of different ways
of getting these contraband items into prisons:
having corrupt relationships with the prison officers
who undertook the searches,
who maybe would turn off the electronic scanners
when you were coming in
so that they wouldn’t pick up on any weapons you had concealed,
who maybe would skip routine searches
so that you could get through.
Drugs are also thrown over the fences
with the knowledge that that certain prison officer
is on duty and will go and pick that package up.
One corrupt prison guard
told Richard that he was originally asked
just to bring in a dressing gown.
When that prisoner received the clothing, they opened it,
and mobile phones just spilled out.
And once that happens, that prison officer was got,
and they now work for that prisoner, essentially.
There were also allegations about drugs and phones
and weapons being concealed in confectionary packets
and on officers’ bodies.
There was one officer who told Richard,
“If you want to be extra safe, you can just stick up your arse.”
There’s a price for any kind of corrupt service
you might want to procure in prison.
You could buy a very cheap burner phone for 200 to 300 pounds.
If you’ve got about 1,500 quid,
you can get hold of a smartphone.
If you were willing to spend 5,000 pounds,
you could even get yourself transferred to a less secure wing
or prison.
And if you can get hold of ten grand,
that’s what it costs to hire a prison officer
to assist you in an actual escape attempt.
I think it’s important to say that not every prison officer is corrupt,
and it’s actually the large percentage of prison officers
are just trying to do a good job.
Ninety nine point nine percent of prison officers are honest
and extremely professional.
They are dedicated to their trade of
looking after people in their custody.
However, the continual erosion
through investment by consecutive governments,
without a doubt, has caused the prison estate to crumble.
This is a very low-paid job.
Prison officers start on about 24,000 pounds a year,
and they're working under incredibly stressful and dangerous conditions.
People join the service, a vast majority in good faith,
and they are then pushed into a position of corruption
where they are manipulated by the people they’re looking after.
And the financial gains are quite large, aren’t they?
So there’s three ways prison officers can become corrupt.
One, they are slowly groomed by a prisoner,
starting off with something harmless
and leading up to hard drugs or weaponry.
Two, prison officers are intimidated by criminals
and prisoners inside the prison walls.
And three, they’re planted there by criminal gangs themselves
with the full intention of working for a prisoner
while they work for the prison service.
And we could see clearly how tempting it would be
when you were working under that kind of stress with such low pay
to give in and kind of agree to the, you know,
agree to start doing corrupt deals with prisoners
to make a bit of extra money.
But we can also say
it wasn’t just about the financial incentive to be corrupt.
There was also real, you know, real fear involved.
I mean, some of these prison officers
were being repeatedly beaten up by prisoners.
They were being threatened and intimidated.
Those drugs or weapons will flow around the prison system,
causing the drug epidemic that we’ve seen in recent years
and leading to a bigger demand.
And then you have more prisoners wanting to get their hands on drugs
and more prison officers being offered money,
being offered services, goods,
and the spiral of corruption continues, you know?
No one’s winning here.
I mean, even the people who receive the payout at the end,
they're still finding themselves working from inside the prison.
They’re heavily involved with criminal enterprises.
There are no winners. It’s just all losers.
Richard’s article was published in December of 2016,
and it met with widespread outrage across the political spectrum.
There were calls for a major government intervention
to crack down on the corruption that he’d exposed.
Since then, the government has established
an anti-corruption taskforce in prisons.
And finally, the government has decided to
come clean about the volume of corruption reports
that are filed against prison officers every year.
We now know that there are 7,000 of those corruption reports each year
against officers in Britain’s prisons.
So it’s great that the government is finally taking action to crack down
but pretty shocking that it took this long,
and it took investigative reporting like Richard’s
to really bring this issue to light.