Sadiq Khan – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners have been (a) prosecuted and (b) convicted for receiving each type of illicit or unauthorised items into prison through the post in each of the last four years.

Jeremy Wright

Prisons employ a range of measures to detect, disrupt and deter the trafficking of illicit items into prisons. Any contraband detected coming into the prison will be recorded on a central incident reporting system. However, to identify the manner in which the contraband entered the prison and any subsequent referral to the police would require a manual interrogation of incident reports. This could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.

Information on prosecutions and convictions for these offences is not held centrally and could only be obtained by asking each prison to source information locally. This, again, could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.