Drugs and disorder: worrying times for prisons

Over the past year, I have been increasingly concerned about the levels of illicit drugs finding their way into prisons, and whilst drugs in prisons are nothing new, I was shocked when we found that, in random tests, more than half the prisoners at Hindley, a Category C resettlement prison between Manchester and Liverpool, tested positive for illicit drug use. For the first time in my experience as Chief Inspector, more people in a jail were under the influence of drugs than sober. We could smell cannabis on the wings and its effects on prisoners were evident.

Sadly Hindley, while being the worst we have recently seen, is far from alone. Only last month we published our latest report on HMP Lowdham Grange, where the positive drug tests were at 40%, while at Woodhill, which is part of the long-term high secure estate, it was 42%. At Lindholme, another large category C prison, 21% of prisoners told us they developed a problem with drugs after arriving at the jail. At some prisons, like Bedford, staffing shortages meant they had given up even testing for drugs. But their presence and effects were obvious.

Drugs either get into prisons through the gate – smuggled in by visitors, staff or in the post – or over the fence. Drones have introduced a new level of challenge in the battle to keep drugs out – as these aren’t £50 drones from Argos, they can cost thousands of pounds and can be in and out of a jail within 20 seconds.

If drugs get in through the gate, all too often it is through corrupt staff, which happens in two distinct ways. The first of these is very sophisticated organised crime groups effectively putting a sleeper into a prison – someone who has no criminal record, has no direct connections, and applies for a job as a prison officer, becomes established and is then able to begin to bring drugs into the jail having worked out where the weaknesses are in any security systems in place. But we also see individual officers who just get corrupted by prisoners while they’re doing their job. There are some very charming prisoners around, and you’ve got very young and inexperienced officers and health staff, with the potential of quite large sums of money being offered by people connected to organised crime on the outside. As soon as they’ve got their hooks into you as a prison officer, they’ve got you because you’re going to lose your job if you’re exposed. So people get pulled in deeper and deeper. There are, of course only a very small number of corrupt staff, the vast majority of officers would not dream of bringing contraband into a jail, but it can only take one to bring chaos to a prison.

Prisons focus most of their effort and resources on preventing the supply of drugs. One of the most effective defences has been airport-style body scanners, which many prisons now have. When people come back from court, for example, they might have secreted drugs on them, but now if someone comes in “plugged”, that will be picked up on a body scanner. The prison service has also increased the use of sniffer dogs, and there has been a resurgence in the use of “incentivised substance free wings”, or drug-free wings.

Drug-free wings have existed in different forms over time, and they have always found it hard to keep drugs out because many of those on the wing will be long-term drug users. While they may well be trying to get off drugs, they are nevertheless an obvious target for drug dealers within the prison. Certainly, this was the case in Hindley, where the drug free wing was one of the most problematic for drugs in the prison.

As important as it is to disrupt the supply of drugs into prisons, this will never work in the absence of sustained work to reduce the demand – people will always find a way to get drugs into prisons if there are people wanting to buy them because the mark-up is vast. That demand is fuelled by boredom: tens of thousands of prisoners continue to spend less than two hours out of their cells each day instead of being in full-time education or employment that prepares them to return to the community.

There are a number of reasons for the persistence of Covid-like regimes where people spend so long locked up and so little time in education or work. Partly there’s inertia, partly there are disagreements with trade unions and many prisons remain short of staff – but fundamentally it’s because prisons just aren’t oriented towards delivering the education, training and work that give people the sorts of skills that are going to make them successful when they come out. While they rightly focus on safety and security, they can do this to the detriment of purposeful activity. And by doing so they miss a trick because you can focus on reducing the supply into prisons until you’re blue in the face but unless you reduce the demand for drugs, in other words prisoners are doing something that feels meaningful with their time, then you’re fighting a losing battle.

The government’s population projections predict we could have up to 114,000 people in prison by 2028, up from around 88,000 now, so that’s an enormous increase. And we return then to the problem that there already aren’t enough places in work or training activities for the existing population. If you build another wing but you don’t build space for education or work, then that fuels the demand for drugs and we see prisons getting trapped into a cycle of rising drugs, violence and staff leaving because they just don’t feel safe.

Most prisoners will one day be released. If they have spent their sentence penned in in overcrowded, squalid conditions developing a worsening drug addiction, that has consequences for us all.