Illicit drug availability in prisons
Ministry of Justice received 2 coroners' reports about this hazard between 8 Sept 2023 and 8 Dec 2025.
They came from 1 coroner in 2 coroner areas. A similar concern was raised again 1 time after the first warning.
No published response from Ministry of Justice was found for the earlier reports.
The story, report by report
Spacing grows with the time between reports.
“The Head of Safety advised that drugs are broughts into HMP The Mount by a number of ways:”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ No published response from Ministry of Justice was found for this report.
- 2 years 3 months laterClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · high
“The availability and use of illicit drugs posed a threat to the stability of the prison, contributing to debt, bullying and fear. The positive drug testing rate at HMP High Down was among the highest in adult male prisons”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Ministry of Justice responded.Response (PDF) ↗
- All reports to Ministry of Justice
Each row is one judged link between an earlier and a later report. Open a row to read both quotes, found word for word in the originals.
2023 → 2025Oliver Mulangala2 years 3 months after Kristopher Tilbury · same coronerClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · high
Closely relatedConfidence 0.85 · highBoth reports highlight the ongoing availability of illicit drugs within prisons as a source of risk. They differ in the specific prison establishments described and the particular consequences emphasized.
Kristopher Tilbury · 8 Sept 2023
“The Head of Safety advised that drugs are broughts into HMP The Mount by a number of ways:”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Oliver Mulangala · 8 Dec 2025
“The availability and use of illicit drugs posed a threat to the stability of the prison, contributing to debt, bullying and fear. The positive drug testing rate at HMP High Down was among the highest in adult male prisons”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗
No published response from Ministry of Justice was found for this report.
No specific action could be extracted with a verified quote.
- Each report's concerns were extracted by Nemotron 3 Nano on Nebius Token Factory, each with a quote copied from the report.
- Concerns from reports to Ministry of Justice at least six months apart were compared by meaning (Qwen3 embeddings) and wording (TF-IDF).
- The closest pairs were judged by Nemotron 3 Super with reasoning on. Only identical or closely related, with confidence of at least 0.70, are shown.
- Every quote was checked by code as an exact substring of the original text. Names of staff and family are redacted, and the deceased are named by report title only.
| Link | Meaning | Wording | Judge | Coroner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 → 2025 | 0.69 | 0.29 | Closely related · 0.85 | same |
Judge model: nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b. How Nemotron did the work · Full methodology.
Next
Other chains for Ministry of Justice
- Lack of basic life support training among prison officers4 reports · 2016–2026
- Lack of communication between prison healthcare and operational staff2 reports · 2016–2026
- Absence of in-cell automatic fire detection2 reports · 2021–2026
- Unrestricted access to novel psychoactive substances in prison4 reports · 2019–2025
This shows that a similar concern was raised again after an earlier report. It does not say why, and it is not a finding about any organisation or person. To report an error, see the corrections route.