Gangland cash spent on prison contract beatings and attempted murders hits staggering £3m

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The gangland spend on contract beatings, slashings and murder bids in crowded Scottish jails has rocketed to more than £3 million - a record high.

The Daily Record can reveal that a recent flood of major gangsters into our crowded prisons is putting more strain on the system, where bloody attacks are already off the scale.

We can reveal that:

*gangland contract violence now tops a record £3 million.

*the number of crime gang members inside has soared by 21% in a year - with 653 now adding to mayhem on a daily basis.

*Violent incidents each month exploded from 95 in 2022 to 163 this year - up 72% in two years.

*The number of drones known to have carried deadly drug and weapon cargoes to jails has rocketed from 7 in 2022 to 67 this year so far - up tenfold.

*8% of the entire prison population is an identified Organised Crime Group member

Tony Martin, the Scottish Prison Service’s Divisional Head of Operational Delivery, told the Record that prison overcrowding is contributing to the risk levels.

And the recent torrent of gangland convictions sparked by the cracking of the international Encrochat encrypted phone system is set to make things even worse.

Martin said: “There’s certainly been a lot of high profile cases recently where high profile individuals identified with organised groups have received very long sentences.

“Police Scotland are convicting people and a lot of dangerous individuals are being taken out of communities, which is a success story.

“However, that success hugely adds to the complexity of managing these individuals on a daily basis, because a lot of these guys don’t stop their criminality when they come into prison.

“If anything, they have another market within the prison as well as the community, so it is in their interest to continue to do business while they’re in our care.”

The recent sentencing of kingpin Jamie Stevenson to 20 years for running a major international drugs racket was just one of a series of high profile and successful organised crime prosecutions recently.

Major efforts are made to separate the worst rival factions throughout Scotland’s prisons - but often threats are only discovered after a violent flare-up.

He said: “Organised crime group members don’t come with a label saying ‘I’m part of this gang or that gang’.

“No one will ever have the full picture, because the full picture evolves on a daily basis.

“Everybody involved in the prison is able to look for changes, get that intelligence that gives you the best picture that you can possibly have.”

He said grudges and vendettas can be acted on within prisons, where gangsters can suddenly be housed next to each other.

He said: “People don’t shake hands once they walk into a prison. These are deep seated grudges and they don’t disappear.

“It could be grudges from before they even got a sentence, and then now they’re put in a place where they can actually get each other in a close proximity.”

Martin said there is a constant threat of prison officers, as well as regular prisoners, being subjected to threats and coercion to bring drugs into jails, adding to the supply line offered by drones.

Prisoners can often be forced to carry out violence - that will merely lead to themselves being targeted for worse violence.

He said: “People will often be coerced and manipulated, whether that’s through threats to them or extended families, whether that’s offers of payment or whether it’s writing off a debt.

“It might be to fund a drug addiction. So there’s all sorts of ways that people will be coerced or involved into doing things.”

SPS intelligence, gathered via outside contacts, family members, prison officers and inside informers has built a database of pressure points and trends, all of which point to rising violence inside prisons.

The cash value of contract violence in 2023 increased to more than £3 million from £2.77 the previous year.

There has been an average of 163 violent incidents logged per month in 2024, compared to 95 in 2022 and 138 in 2023 - up 72% in two years.

Attacks are being fuelled by the constant importing of high value drugs and mobile phones into jails by drones, which means a special air defence team is deployed to intercept the mini aircrafts.

Scottish Prison Service bosses have commended their own officers for stopping much of the violence and seizing huge amounts of drugs.

Martin said: “I think the training and the professionalism, the motivation our staff group, aid us in meeting the majority of our prisons for the vast majority of time, safe and calm places.”

But he admits the flow of serious crime kingpins into prisons means the violence is impossible to contain.

He said: “I don’t want to present a horrible picture of prisons, because actually, seven days a week, four weeks a month, most of our prisons are quite settled in calm environments to work and live in.

“However, the problem you’ve got is that the threat of violence is always there, and conflict can escalate very quickly to a point where violence is used.”

He said SPS staff cope admirably with the challenges, saying: “We invest heavily in staff, as individuals and as teams. We train them at high levels to deal with any issues that they face, and actually, the interpersonal skills in our staff are probably their biggest weapon in their armoury.

“Our staff will stop incidents actually coming to violence through jailcraft and their ability to diffuse situations using their interpersonal skills.

“So we can only talk about the ones we know that happened, that we have an incident for but I can assure you that our staff on a daily basis across the estate diffuse lots of potential violent incidents. “

Justice Secretary Angela Constance said efforts are being made to tackle overcrowding and subsequent prison violence.

She said: “The Scottish Government is taking action to deal with the pressures of a high and complex prison population, and we have increased the Scottish Prison Service resource budget by 10% to £436.5 million in 2024-25 to enable it to continue to provide a safe and secure estate.

“We are aware of the impact of organised crime on the prison estate and we continue to work with SPS and other partners on the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce to reduce the harm caused.”

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