Sadiq Khan – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-03-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what sentence was received by each employee of the Prison Service found guilty in 2013 of criminal activity in the workplace.

Jeremy Wright

The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) does not hold records of employees found guilty of all types of criminal activity.

Whilst the vast majority of its staff are honest and hard working, NOMS is committed to detecting, deterring and disrupting all corrupt behaviour by individuals working in prisons. A dedicated NOMS Corruption Prevention Unit was set up to ensure staff corruption is identified and tackled. As part of this work NOMS has compiled a central record of staff convicted of criminal offences which meet the NOMS definition of corruption.

This definition is that corruption occurs when a person in a position of authority or trust abuses their position for their or another person’s benefit or gain. This would include the misuse of their role in order to plan or commit a criminal act, or a deliberate failure to act to prevent criminal behaviour.

There were 23 convictions for corruption-related offences during 2013. A breakdown of the different sentences is provided below.

The total number of convictions by year for corruption-related offences is shown in the table below. The number of convictions has remained broadly constant over the last five years.

The information provided has 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.