Contraband mobile phones enabling drug misuse
Ministry of Justice received 2 coroners' reports about this hazard between 31 Jan 2019 and 8 Dec 2025.
They came from 2 different coroners 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.
“Many problems within the prison related to substances misuse are contributed to by the use of contraband mobile phones. The inquest heard evidence that blocking the use of mobile phones in prison would be very useful in mitigating this risk”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ No published response from Ministry of Justice was found for this report.
- 6 years 10 months laterClosely relatedConfidence 0.90 · higha different coroner
“Mobile phones are easily available in HM Prison High Down, as in many other prisons in England & Wales a. The access to mobile phones facilitates prisoners' conduct and finance of drug dealing, including the arranging for the delivery of drugs by drones to precise locations at specified times”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Repeated from the earlier report:MobilephonesPrisonmany
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.
2019 → 2025Oliver Mulangala6 years 10 months after Andrew Carr · different coronerClosely relatedConfidence 0.90 · high
Closely relatedConfidence 0.90 · highBoth reports identify contraband mobile phones as a factor that enables substance‑misuse and drug‑related harm in prisons. The earlier report focuses on mobile phones contributing to substance misuse generally, while the later report details how mobile phones facilitate drug dealing and the supply of new psychoactive substances.
Andrew Carr · 31 Jan 2019
“Many problems within the prison related to substances misuse are contributed to by the use of contraband mobile phones. The inquest heard evidence that blocking the use of mobile phones in prison would be very useful in mitigating this risk”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Oliver Mulangala · 8 Dec 2025
“Mobile phones are easily available in HM Prison High Down, as in many other prisons in England & Wales a. The access to mobile phones facilitates prisoners' conduct and finance of drug dealing, including the arranging for the delivery of drugs by drones to precise locations at specified times”
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 → 2025 | 0.78 | 0.31 | Closely related · 0.90 | different |
Judge model: nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b. How Nemotron did the work · Full methodology.
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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.