IN-DEPTH: Why the Prison Service Has Never Been Able to Get to Grips With Mobile Phones in Jail

Undated image of Alex Mullings, a prisoner serving a life sentence who rang a drug and phone smuggling ring from HMP Swaleside in Kent, England. Metropolitan Police

Seven people have been convicted of conspiring to smuggle drugs into prisons in London and Kent after a trial which heard ringleader Alex Mullings manipulated his underlings from behind bars while using 33 illicit mobile phones.

Mullings’s mother, Alexandra Nicolaou, 52, girlfriend Charlotte Finch, 21, and co-defendants Hamza Ahmed, 29, Ahmed Binfgih, 58, Katriye Kaplan, 32, and Danyaal Msaouri-Coulson, 22, were found guilty of a series of charges at Southwark Crown Court.

At the start of the trial, in Aug. 2023, prosecutor Kevin Dent, KC, said Mullings, who he described as running an operation akin to “an illegal Amazon,” had already pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including conspiracy to supply heroin on the streets of London on a “commercial” scale.

But it can now be revealed that Mullings, 32, was already serving a life sentence, which he was given after he used a mobile phone in Wandsworth prison to order eight Skorpion sub-machine guns and hundreds of bullets, which were delivered across the country by Parcelforce.

In June 2014, Mullings, who was serving a sentence for a series of robberies, used a mobile phone to arrange the importation of the guns.

Sentencing him in 2015, Judge David Farrell told him, “It is a scandal that the security at Wandsworth was so wholly inadequate that you were able to do so.”

Prison security clearly has not improved in the past decade, and the demand for mobile phones by inmates has not diminished.

Mr. Dent told the jury Mullings used 33 different mobile phones while in prison, and he said all of the defendants broke the law when they spoke to him on the phone as they “must have known” he was a prisoner and was forbidden to use a mobile phone behind bars.

Phones Flown Over Prison Walls by Drones

Mullings dreamed up a scheme to smuggle packages of drugs and dozens of tiny Zanco mobile phones into Swaleside prison in Kent by drone in the middle of the night.

Nicolaou was convicted of conspiring to convey phones into the prison. Binfgih, Ahmed and Msaouri-Coulson were acquitted of this charge.

In his closing speech, Mr. Dent said Mullings was clearly an “unpleasant character” but he said he did not force or menace his co-defendants but instead offered them financial incentives.

Commenting on Finch’s claim that she carried out crimes under duress and was a victim of modern slavery, Mr. Dent said, “This is a world away from a scenario where people are locked up in a confined space and prevented from going anywhere ... the person in the confined space was Mullings.”

Binfgih, Msaouri-Coulson, Kaplan and Finch were all convicted of transmitting or causing to transmit without authorisation sounds or images from within one of Her Majesty’s Prisons, namely phone calls, text-based messages and images, between January 2016 and December 2019.

Criminals wanting to use mobile phones in jail for nefarious purposes is a dilemma which has troubled the Prison Service for at least 20 years and has included at least two murders arranged from behind bars.

In the early hours of Apr. 8, 2006, Andrew “Sparks” Wanogho—a gangster who had literally got away with murder after a trial collapsed two years earlier—was shot dead in a south London street.

Prime suspect Delphon Nicholas would appear to have had a cast iron alibi—he was locked up in Belmarsh prison on the night of the murder.

But it transpired Nicholas had “orchestrated the execution” of Wanogho, using an illicit phone, which had been smuggled in, to make and receive numerous calls to the gunman, Trevor Dennie, and a woman who was used as a “honey trap.”

Nicholas was jailed for a minimum of 30 years in 2008.

A year before, Ryan Lloyd, a member of Liverpool’s notorious Croxteth Crew gang, was jailed for life for ordering the murder of a gang rival, Liam “Smigger” Smith, after an argument in the visiting area of Altcourse prison on Merseyside.

The trial heard Lloyd ran back to his cell and used an illicit phone to call in the hitmen. The jury heard Lloyd was overheard saying: “Quick, quick, give us the phone, I'll get the boys up here to pop him.”

In 2008, the Ministry of Justice said they planned to introduce new Body Orifice Security Scanners (Boss) scanners to clamp down on the smuggling of mobile phones.

The Boss chairs were designed to detect small metallic objects, such as mobile phones, knives and gun components, without the need for intrusive strip searches.

But despite their introduction, the flow of phones into prison has not abated.

Liz Truss Tried and Failed to Stop Inmates Getting Phones

In 2016, the then-Justice Secretary Liz Truss said, “We are determined to do all we can to prevent prisoners having access to mobile phones.”

“We are stepping up measures to find and block them and empowering prison officers to take action. I am determined to make sure our prisons are safe and places of rehabilitation,” added Ms. Truss, who would briefly be prime minister in 2022.

In 2019, staff at Guy’s Marsh, a prison in Dorset, found a dead rat which had been stuffed with drugs and mobile phones and then sewed up and thrown over the wall.

A dead rat found by prison staff with drugs and a mobile phone, wrapped in cellophane in side. Ministry of Justice

There have also been numerous incidents where drones—which can be easily purchased for a few hundred pounds—were repurposed to drop packages of drugs or phones into exercise yards and other places within the grounds of prisons.

Last month, police in Edinburgh were investigating after a drone thought to be carrying drugs and phones crashed near the city’s Saughton prison in the middle of the night.

As the Prison Service found it increasingly hard to recruit staff with unimpeachable integrity, so the number of corrupt officers grew and with it the number of phones being smuggled in.

In October last year, 17 people were convicted for smuggling drugs, weapons and mobile phones into Lindholme prison in South Yorkshire between 2018 and 2020.

Amy Hatfield, a mental health support worker at the prison who became “infatuated” with one inmate, Joseph Whittingham, was jailed for ten years for her role.

The following month, Rahimah De Silva was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to conspiring to smuggle phones into her brother Denny De Silva, an inmate at Woodhill prison near Milton Keynes.

De Silva was serving a life sentence for murdering a man in north west London, and had been using the phones to access and disseminate Islamist extremist material.

In July 2023, he pleaded guilty to two counts of dissemination of a terrorist publication and one count of conspiring to convey phones into prison and was sentenced to a further 45 months’ imprisonment in September 2023.

Aside from concerns about convicted criminals using illicit phones to carry out more crimes behind bars, there is also the danger of them using smartphones to intimidate and harass their victims or their families, including on social media.

Rebecca Tidy, a journalist who has researched the use of phones by prisoners, told The Epoch Times: “It is a huge problem for the ex-partners of violent men. I know many women who have had the prison landline of their ex’s blocked but these guys keep finding out their mobile phone numbers and make threats or engage in emotional abuse.”

She said, “Sometimes these men use social media on smartphones to spy on their ex-partners.”

Prisons in England and Wales use a number of covert techniques to identify which devices are used to find illicit phones, but they have failed to stop the widespread use of phones by inmates.

Is Blocking Mobile Phone Signals the Answer?

So why don’t prisons just block mobile phone signals?

Under the Wireless Telegraphy Act it is illegal to block any mobile phone or radio frequency but there is an exemption for agencies of the Crown, such as MI5, MI6 or His Majesty’s Prison Service.

But the Ministry of Justice may have decided against blocking mobile phone signals after watching the less-than-successful experiment in Scotland.

In 2014, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) announced plans to install mobile signal-blocking equipment at two prisons, Shotts and Glenochil in Clackmannanshire.

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But the £1.2 million pilot project foundered because prisoners found ways round it.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain in the spring of 2020 and prison visits were banned, the Scottish government decided to hand out prison-issue mobile phones to inmates to keep in touch with their friends and families on the outside.

But some prisoners hacked the phones and there were 5,000 reported “misuses.”

Last year Fiona Cruickshanks, the head of the SPS public protection unit, said organised criminals preferred to use smuggled smartphones but some inmates would always look for ways to beat the security on prison-issued phones.

In June 2023, the SPS announced plans to install landlines in cells, to replace the prison-issue phones.

In a statement they said, “The hard-wired in-cell telephones will be subject to the same robust security, which has governed the use of mobile phones and those in halls.”

A Prison Service spokesperson said, in an email to The Epoch Times, “We do not tolerate drugs and mobile phones in prison and those found with them face extra time behind bars. Our £100 million investment in prison security has also helped us uncover more than 46,000 attempts to smuggle contraband into jails.”