Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to ensure that inmates found to have used social media in prison are punished appropriately.

We do not tolerate the use of mobile phones in our prisons and will seek to punish those responsible.

The Prison Service’s Digital Media Investigations Unit (DMIU) works with prisons to identify offenders accessing websites and shuts these down quickly. In 2019, 387 social media profiles were removed.

Prisoners found guilty of using phones or other devices to upload information to social media websites can face punishments including prosecution in court which can result in sentences of up to two years’ further imprisonment.

We are investing an extra £100 million across the prison estate to fund additional staff, X-ray body scanners, baggage scanners and drug detection technology at prison gates, so that we can stop phones from entering prisons. The same investment will fund cutting-edge phone detection and blocking technology so that we can stop phones that do enter from working, or detect and retrieve them. Additionally, we are building a new digital forensics facility, which will enhance our capability to exploit intelligence from seized phones.