Asked by: Andrew Percy (Conservative - Brigg and Goole)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the level of illegal use of cellular devices in UK prisons; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Jeremy Wright
The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) takes the issue of mobile phones in prisons very seriously and is committed to addressing the risks they present to both the security of prisons and the safety of the public.
NOMS has implemented a multi-layer approach: to minimise the number of mobile phones entering prisons, to find phones that do get in and to disrupt mobile phones that cannot be found. A range of technology has been rolled out to prisons to strengthen searching and security, including portable mobile phone signal detectors, Body Orifice Security Scanners (BOSS chairs), high sensitivity metal detecting wands and short range portable mobile phone blockers.
In 2012 prisons reported 7,301 seizures* of mobile phones and/or SIM cards. All figures provided have been drawn from live administrative data systems which may be amended at any time. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.
*One seizure may constitute a handset containing one SIM card or media card, a handset only, or a SIM card only.