'Shocking' prison churns out drug addicts

TWO-THIRDS of inmates freed from one of Scotland's busiest jails test positive for illegal drugs because of the flourishing narcotics trade behind bars, a report by Scotland's prisons watchdog has revealed.

Chronic overcrowding and staff shortages at the dilapidated Craiginches prison in Aberdeen have created the ideal conditions for a booming trade in heroin, cocaine, cannabis and other illegal drugs.

Prisoners forced to spend long hours locked in their cells are turning to drugs to relieve the boredom. And mobile phones, thrown over the walls of the jail, are being used by drug overlords to direct trafficking operations inside the prison.

The scale of the problem is detailed today by Andrew McLellan, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, in his full inspection report on Craiginches.

It reveals that, in random tests when they are admitted, 79 per cent of inmates show up positive for drugs. And the figure has been reduced to only 67 per cent by the time they are released – the smallest cut ever recorded at a Scottish prison.

Figures obtained by The Scotsman show Aberdeen has the highest rate of prisoners failing drug tests when they are freed. They tested positive for cannabis, benzodiazepines such as Valium, heroin and other opiates, and methadone.

Across all of Scotland's prisons, the average failure on release was 39 per cent. Second in the league of failures was Kilmarnock, with 57 per cent, followed by Cornton Vale women's prison, on 55 per cent, and Glenochil and Perth each on 52 per cent.

Dr McLellan said: "Aberdeen is a particularly shocking example of a problem which exists across all Scotland's prisons.

"This 12 per cent reduction from reception to liberation is the lowest reduction noted in any prison in Scotland.

"It is as certain as can be that an overcrowded prison where there are considerable staff shortages and little available work will hold prisoners who spend long, long hours locked inside their cells.

"This is exactly what happens in Aberdeen. These are also the circumstances in which illegal drug-taking may thrive."

A spokesman for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) said it treated drug trafficking within jails as a high priority issue. It had spent considerable resources tackling the trade and was using a range of technologies, including body scanners, to identity drug smugglers.

The spokesman went on: "We have also had new legislation brought in in recent months to make owning a mobile an offence against the prison rules, because people are using mobile phones to control drug trafficking with the outside.

"It is a huge issue for us. And Aberdeen has a particularly acute problem because of the drug business in the area."

The spokesman said the SPS also provided various programmes within prisons to help people get off drugs and turn their lives around.

Keith Simpson, the head of development and research with the prisoners' charity Sacro, said: "The SPS are trying their best within the difficulties that they've got.

"But one has to ask how many of these people would be better treated in specialist drug rehabilitation centres as opposed to prison.

"In other countries, there is more use of residential drug treatment rather than prison. But here in Scotland, we seem to send people to prison rather than drug rehabilitation.

"It had been thought for a while that, at least while people were in prison, they were kept away from the drugs, but clearly this blows that argument apart."

---

Expert calls for investment to slash re-offending rate

MINISTERS were last night urged to spend more money tackling drug abuse in Scotland amid concern at the link between drugs in prison and reoffending.

The high level of drug abuse inside prison reflects a much wider problem that must be addressed, according to Jim Dickie, a former assistant prison governor and director of social work at North Lanarkshire Council.

An estimated 56,000 people in Scotland are drug addicts and more than a quarter of those in treatment admit they commit crime to fund their habits. Only 26 per cent of prisoners sentenced to less than four years keep a clean record two years after their release. Drug abuse is said to be one of the main driving factors for such the high reoffending rate.

Mr Dickie said effort should be directed at getting people off drugs in the first place.

"Money needs to go on rehabilitation of drug addicts both inside and outside prisons rather than chasing a chimera of eradicating drugs from jail," he said.

---

Always a step behind the smugglers

COMMENTARY: Derek Turner

EVERY time we stop people trying to smuggle drugs into prison, they come up with another ingenious way.

Classic examples include throwing a dead bird stuffed with drugs over the wall, or doing the same with a tennis ball. We've also seen heroin and cocaine smuggled into prison underneath stamps on letters addressed to inmates.

Only last month we heard that a remote-controlled toy helicopter was used to try to smuggle drugs into a jail in England.

But probably the most common way is prisoners themselves ingesting drugs in a condom, or some other receptacle, before they go to court. The favoured technique at Cornton Vale was for inmates to put drugs inside the plastic container inside Kinder Eggs and secrete that in their body.

Staff are not allowed to body search every prisoner who comes in – only the ones that are suspected of doing something. And we just don't have the resources to do that.

Visiting time is another classic opportunity to smuggle drugs. When I was a serving prison officer, in the early 1990s, the authorities did away with enclosed visits. They had to be open visits, where the visitor and the inmate were free to mingle. So we started seeing drugs secreted in babies' nappies, or in tampons that were left in the toilets for the prisoner to collect.

Even when they had glass panels separating the inmate and the visitor, you would see heroin being injected directly through the wire mesh at the bottom. There are so many ways it can be done, and they are always finding new ways.

Another opportunity presents itself when prisoners come back from work placements or home visits.

We try our best to stop drugs getting in but it's difficult. There are so many visits going on, often at the same time, where there is one-to-one contact.

There's only so much we can do with the limited resources at our disposal.

Some high-security prisons in England require visitors to stand in a designated area where they are checked over by a sniffer dog.

Unless we are prepared to pay for these things, we are always going to have a difficult job stopping drugs getting into prison.

A more effective way to reduce the amount of drugs in prisons would be to tackle drug abuse in the wider society.

If there is a big drug problem in the community, that will be reflected in the micro-society of the prison.

We can do something about tackling drugs in our jails in the short run. But in the long run, a more productive approach may well be to tackle the bigger picture of drugs in Scotland.

• Derek Turner is assistant secretary of the Prison Officers' Association in Scotland.