Drugs in Prison: who’s controlling who?

[Lunar Loops]

This from drinkanddrugs.net :

Drugs in Prison: who’s controlling who?

Drugs are taking over the prison system and a strategy overhaul is dangerously overdue,

suggests Professor Neil McKeganey.

‘There is another solution...
you stop sending your addicts

to jail in the first place.’

In the classic nineteen seventies TV
series ‘Porridge’

cigarettes are the
common currency exchanged between
prisoners, and drugs are not even
mentioned at all. If the series were
being remade now it would be illegal
drugs that were being exchanged
between prisoners and the laughs
would be a good deal fewer. Drug abuse,
in a way that was not even anticipated
in the seventies, has virtually taken over
our prison system to the point where
the system itself is under severe threat.
There are numerous estimates of the
number of inmates in Scottish prisons
with a drug problem and the number
who are actually using illegal drugs
within prison. The eighth Scottish Prison
Service survey found that out of the
23,206 prisoners admitted in 2005, 62 per
cent were referred to addictions services.
Some 50 per cent of those with a drug
problem had used drugs in prison, with
heroin being the second most commonly
used drug after cannabis. Alarming as
those figures are, the situation in certain
prisons may be even worse. In the case of
Corntonvale, Scotland’s only all women
prison, it has been reported that on
occasion, approaching 100 per cent of
women prisoners have a serious drug
problem. The dangers associated with the
extent of drug abuse in Scottish jails are
manifest.
First, there is the danger that some
individuals will be entering the prison
system drug free and acquiring a habit by
the time they leave. In this situation the
fact of living day by day alongside other
prisoners who are using illegal drugs may
have led some prisoners to start to use
drugs as a way of coping with prison life.
Second, there is the danger that
individuals who enter the prison system
with a low level drug habit find their
habit escalating in the face of the sheer
availability of drugs in prison. Third, there
is the real danger that the growth of the
drug economy in prison starts to corrupt
the prison system itself. A recent leaked
report from the English Prison Service’s
anti-corruption unit and the Police
estimated that there may be as many as
1,000 corrupt officers working within
English prisons. Much of that corruption
is associated with the trade in illegal
drugs and the provision of mobile phones
to prisoners. We would be naïve not to

recognise the potential for similar
corruption within our own prison system
and the very strong likelihood that it is
already occurring. Illegal drug use has an
unparalleled ability to corrode and corrupt
because of the enormous sums of money
involved and the capacity to bribe and
intimidate those that stand in its way.
The fourth problem when drugs take
over, is the fact that a custodial sentence
may come to be seen by the addict not as
the loss of their individual freedom, but
an opportunity to renew old acquaintances
and establish new contacts that
may assist the individual’s drug habit on
the outside. Prisons may not become the
schools of diverse criminality that many
once feared, but the breeding grounds for
an escalating drug problem.
If these are the problems, what are
the possible solutions? The first thing
you need to be able to do is to reduce the
flow of drugs into prison. That inevitably
means much closer supervision of prison
visits as well as prison staff. But what
would a prison look like, that carried out
such a high level of supervision? It would
be immeasurably more unpleasant for
the prisoners as well as the staff, and in
its own way that much more difficult to
manage. There would also almost
certainly be much wider use of drug
testing of prisoners.
But simply finding out if a prisoner
has used illegal drugs is not enough. We
also have to ensure that the very best
treatment services are available within
prison. But if you are going to provide
drug treatment in prison you have to be
clear about the aims of that treatment.
For years methadone was largely
unavailable within Scottish prisons
because the focus of those prisons was
on detoxing prisoners rather than
stabilising them. The prison service,
however, was criticised for the
substantial number of addicts who
overdosed when they left prison and
resumed their drug habit. Under the
pressure of that criticism, the prison
service has come to focus more on
stabilising addicts than detoxing them,
and in that context methadone had
come to be much more widely used.
However, stabilising addicts is not going
to reduce the scale of the prison population
with a drug problem, and if you
don’t do that you run the real risk of
watching the numbers of addicts in
prison steadily rising to the point where
prison itself becomes the place where
you temporarily house your addict
population.
There is another solution which is no
less controversial – you stop sending your
addicts to jail in the first place. This is an
understandable response when you
consider that much of the crime that
addicts commit is to fund their drug habit.
The trouble with this solution though is
the fact that it leads you down the road of
operating a parallel criminal justice
system with individuals who commit their
crime to fund a drug habit being treated
in a different way to those who commit
their crime for financial gain.
While this may suit the addict it
hardly seems fair to the non-addict, and
it actually may send out the entirely
wrong message that you are better off
committing your crimes to fund a drug
habit than for any other reason. While
we may come to accept the greater use
of non-custodial sentences for those who
commit their crimes to fund a drug habit,
that acceptance will only last for as long
as there is clear evidence that such
sentences are indeed reducing the scale
of addict criminality.
In the past we used to talk about
creating drug free areas in prison. That
notion seems now to have been
dropped as little more than a chimera. If
that is the case, then the problems we
face are even more acute than we
realise. Tackling illegal drugs in prison
may involve an investment in treatment
and security well beyond what is
currently occurring. However the
dangers of failing in this area may be a
prison system that starts to be
controlled by its drug problem rather
than controlling that problem.

Neil McKeganey is Professor of Drug
Misuse Research at the University of

Glasgow.

[CRUNK]

Anyone else find it ironic that they're just now realizing this? It's a damn shame that drug users and sellers have to be in the same shark tank as killers, rapists, child molesters, and what not. Our prison system is wacked!