BEIJING, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- China has punished 3,149 corrupt wardens over the past five years, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said here on Friday.

A number of senior wardens were caught taking bribes, including Li Wenhua, the former director of the Bureau of Prison Administration in southwest China's Sichuan Province, and Zhang Chongliang, former director of the Reeducation Through Labor Administration in the eastern Jiangxi Province, said a SPP press release.

Li was arrested in August last year though no detailed report was available on how much money he had taken. He was involved in a case where the former chief warden of Chuanxi Prison, Wu Bangzhi, took more than two million yuan (260,000 U.S. dollars) from a prisoner in return for secretly letting him out of confinement a number of times.

Zhang was sentenced to 10 years in prison in November last year for accepting 260,000 yuan from two contractors for several infrastructure projects.

According to Chinese laws, procuratorates set up offices in prisons and centers of reeducation. Prosecutors corrected about 11,000 improper cases over the past five years when they were going through more than 310,000 applications handed down by jail administrations and 290,000 relevant judgments ordered by the courts, the SPP said.

They also found out 26,000 cases of illegal detention, release and punishment.