Mobile phones, drugs and takeaways smuggled into UK jail cells

Police are to investigate how inmates smuggled mobile phones, drugs, steaks, and fish & chips takeaways into a Dorset prison, as the British government came under pressure to reduce prisoner numbers.

The prison service said it had called in the police after pictures showing inmates at HMP Guys Marsh with the contraband were posted online.

“We will be referring this matter to the police for investigation and have had the social media profiles removed,” a spokesperson said.

“We are stepping up measures to find and block mobile phones in prisons and those found with them face extra time behind bars.”

Prison officers went on strike briefly this week to draw attention to growing disorder, overcrowding and staff shortages in British prisons.

There have been more than 600 serious assaults on prison staff and more than 2,000 on other inmates in the past year, as prisoner numbers have risen to 85,000, almost twice their level 20 years ago.

The chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, on Thursday urged justice secretary Liz Truss to "get a grip" on the number of prisoners who are still incarcerated after their sentences have expired.

Public safety

More than 3,800 prisoners in England and Wales are serving indeterminate Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences, under which they are kept in prison after they have served their sentences, on grounds of public safety.

IPP sentences were abolished in 2012 and Mr Clarke said that many of those still held under them were trapped in a backlogged system and should be released.

“This should be addressed as a matter of urgency, and it’s not just a case of resources – there have been failings and blockages in the prison service, in the probation service and the parole board.

“And we suggest that the only person who’s got the authority to get a grip on the way things happen – it may mean policy changes . . . is the secretary of state,” he told the BBC.

Former justice secretary Michael Gove has also called for urgent action to reduce the prison population, saying that effective rehabilitation was impossible as long as prisons remained overcrowded and underfunded.

“The problem – in a nutshell – is that we have a system operating at practically full capacity with nowhere near enough flexibility to devote the time, care and attention needed to secure successful rehabilitation,” he said.

“It is an inconvenient truth – which I swerved to an extent while in office – that we send too many people to prison. And of those who deserve to be in custody, many, but certainly not all, are sent there for too long.”

Mr Gove noted that Britain incarcerates a far higher percentage of its population than other European countries and that sentences have become longer in recent years.

“In pragmatic terms, it seems to me obvious that we can provide a more effective rehabilitation regime with fewer offenders in jail and more professional attention given to those who remain - because overcrowded prisons are more likely to be academies of crime, brutalisers of the innocent and incubators of addiction rather than engines of self-improvement,” he said.