A previously convicted former employee of the Prison Reform Trust (PRT) has been jailed after stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from the charity.
This week, Samantha O’Sullivan was sentenced to three years and eight months in prison after stealing over £300,000 from the charity whilst employed as its head of finance and human resources between 2016 and 2023.
In a statement, PRT chief executive Pia Sinha said O’Sullivan “deliberately set out to defraud the charity of its funds, stealing money that was intended to support the 88,000 people in prison we serve”.
Sinha has said that hiring O’Sullivan was a mistake, given her prior conviction and financial responsibility at PRT, but that the charity continues to believe in “giving people second chances”.
‘Breach of trust’
PRT said it discovered the criminality in the summer of 2024, “largely as a result of the diligence of the current leadership team”.
After undertaking a forensic and criminal investigation and finding evidence of the fraud, the charity reported the matter to the police via Action Fraud.
However, when the police did not pursue the matter further, the charity funded a private prosecution.
“As a result, criminal proceedings were then instigated and justice has been obtained,” Sinha said in a statement in May, after O’Sullivan had admitted to the fraud.
PRT said its current senior management team had not been involved in the appointment of O’Sullivan and that “hiring someone with a previous fraud conviction for a senior role involving financial responsibility was a mistake”.
The sentencing remarks, seen by Civil Society, show that O’Sullivan previously committed fraud while working for the official receiver in 2011, which resulted in a 12-month sentence.
After serving three months of that sentence, she was released in March 2013.
She quickly obtained work with PRT and, after being promoted, began diverting money. Over seven years and three months, she committed 170 fraudulent transactions, nearly one every other week, amounting to just over £300,000.
The judge said: “Your actions were designed to deceive. You were in a position of trust. I don’t regard this as particularly sophisticated but it was beyond opportunistic. That is a small part of the aggravation in this case. But your action was in breach of trust.”
‘We continue to believe in second chances’
Responding to O’Sullivan’s sentencing this week, Sinha said her actions represented “an egregious breach of trust”.
“Given the gravity of the offence, a prison sentence was almost inevitable,” she said.
“As a charity focused on prison reform and rehabilitation, seeing a former colleague handed a custodial sentence has raised a lot of complex and difficult emotions.
“Despite the harm she has caused, and the need for justice to be served, we hope Miss O’Sullivan will have an opportunity to reflect on her actions and is given the support she needs to rehabilitate.”
Sinha added that having reflected on the lessons her charity needs to learn from this “sad episode”, “we continue to believe in giving people second chances, but this must always be done responsibly and with appropriate safeguards in place”.
“Our funders and donors place their confidence in us to be responsible stewards of their generous contributions and we take that role extremely seriously.
“As a result of bringing this case to justice, we have reviewed our policies and introduced robust safeguards to ensure such wrongdoing cannot happen again.
“We’ll always act in a way that protects our organisation, our donors and the people we support.”
PRT, which was chaired by James Timpson from 2019 until he was appointed prisons minister in 2024, was established in 1981 to “create a just, humane and effective penal system”.
