14 prison officers suspended over corruption claims

· Allegations thought to include drug trafficking
· Pentonville to conduct internal inquiry

Fourteen prison officers were suspended yesterday after allegations of corruption believed to involve trafficking in mobile phones and cannabis, and of "inappropriate relationships" with inmates.

The allegations against the suspended prison officers at Pentonville prison in north London are to be investigated in an internal inquiry led by governors from other London prisons. They involve one senior prison officer and 13 other officers and those suspended include male and female staff. "If any alleged or otherwise suspected criminal activity is uncovered during the investigations relevant information will be passed to the police," a Prison Service spokeswoman said.

The decision by Pentonville's governor to suspend the 14 officers immediately triggered an overcrowding crisis at the prison, where 1,125 inmates are packed into a jail with an official "operational capacity" of 1,127. The situation reflects the national crisis in prison numbers in England and Wales, which hit a new record last Friday when they reached 79,094 - just 705 spaces short of the total capacity of the system.

The Prison Service said Pentonville would briefly reduce its operational capacity by 116 places to 1,011 in the next two days to ensure that the regime at the prison was unaffected by the change in staffing numbers.

The director general of the Prison Service, Phil Wheatley, said: "I will not tolerate staff corruption of any sort by any member of the Prison Service. Allegations of corruption will be investigated thoroughly and where evidence is found to support those allegations, the appropriate disciplinary action will be taken."

But Colin Moses, the chairman of the Prison Officers' Association, who was at Pentonville yesterday, said more stringent vetting of prison officers was needed and claimed some of the problems were caused by a policy of local recruitment.

He also called for external police investigation: "I am concerned that the current internal disciplinary procedures only require a case to be tested on the balance of probabilities, which is not appropriate in this instance. All allegations of such serious proportion must be tested and proven beyond all reasonable doubt to ensure justice prevails."

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said he was alarmed that the suspension had triggered an overcrowding crisis: "This government has failed to address the lack of capacity in our prisons. Consequently when an issue like this arises, one of the side-effects is that there is no additional capacity to cope with these arrangements and serious damage is done. The ability to both punish and rehabilitate offenders is dramatically undermined."

The launch of the investigation follows the disclosure last month of a joint Metropolitan police and Prison Service report which suggested that around 1,000 prison officers across England and Wales were involved in corruption, ranging from accepting cash bribes to move inmates to "easier" prisons to smuggling drugs into prison. The report, which was the result of a year-long investigation by the Prison Service's anti-corruption unit and the Met, said while most prison staff were honest there were about 600 "inappropriate relationships" between staff and inmates. The report also claimed that when intelligence was received about corrupt officers often no action was taken. The Prison Service professional standards unit held 1,360 formal investigations into alleged staff misconduct. There were also 192 disciplinary hearings after governors' investigations and 40 staff were dismissed for "unprofessional conduct".

The suspension of 14 staff at Pentonville has a greater than expected impact because only 129 of its 379 prison officers are on duty at any one time.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,1844692,00.html