What should we do about the problem of drugs in our prisons?
Rory Cahill looks at the model used in Pennsylvania which is what the Tories would like introduced in Scotland
Circles don’t get much more vicious than that of drugs and prison. The majority of those coming into our prisons have drug addiction issues, creating a demand and the ultimate captive market. So inevitably, there are drugs available in those same prisons. And because they can get drugs in prison, when they come out, it’s often with an unresolved addiction that requires feeding, thus more crime and a return to jail.
For most, it is common sense writ large that our jails should be drug free. If most of our offenders have drug addictions of some sort, then jail, as well as providing a place of punishment for their crimes, should also offer a respite from the daily – hourly – demands of an addiction and an opportunity for prisoners to attempt to come off drugs and rehabilitate themselves.
Yet keeping drugs out of our prisons seems nigh on impossible. While ?Scotland’s open estate has attracted headlines for its allegedly heroin-soaked environment, illicit drugs are also regularly seized in the closed estate, including ?high-security establishments like HMP Shotts and Glenochil. The figures tell the story: in 2007 there were 1,779 seizures of illicit drugs across the SPS system, slightly down on the previous year’s 1,942, but a massive increase on even the 2003 figure of 862.
Every kind of prison is affected. In Polmont Young Offenders’ Instution last year, there were 120 seizures and in the women’s facility at Cornton Vale there were 110. At Barlinnie, which sees a constant stream of prisoners arriving from the busiest court in Europe, Glasgow Sheriff Court, there were 396 seizures while in Shotts, a relatively settled institution of prisoners serving longer sentences, there were 96. The smaller regional prisons like Dumfries (34 seizures) have the same problem as the big metropolitan establishments like Edinburgh with 226.
Given that the SPS itself tells us that upon admission, 69 per cent of prisoners report illicit drug use, with 53 per cent of all prisoners admitting heroin use, within the last 12 months, compared with a figure of just 8 per cent in the wider community, these figures should not come as too much of a surprise. Although the SPS does not break down its seizures by type of drug, heroin and prescription drugs like valium are most commonly abused in our jails, reflecting the addictions of those inside them.
But what do the figures mean in an international context? Are Scottish jails truly awash with drugs by international standards? And more importantly, are we chasing the ultimate mirage if we set ourselves a target of having truly drug-free prisons? Would we not be better spending our increasingly limited resources trying to help prisoners who say they’d like to get off drugs rather than engaging in an endless battle trying to stop drugs being smuggled into our jails?
The issue cannot, and is not being ignored. Drugs in prisons are a key source of violence and tension between inmates and the varying levels of purity, combined with low tolerance of some prisoners who only get access to drugs irregularly, means that overdose deaths are a genuine danger. What is up for debate is the approach we take to deal with the problem.
Professor Andrew Coyle, director of the International Centre for Prison Studies and a former governor at Scottish prisons, says the reality is that short of imposing draconian measures that would be illegal under human rights legislation anyway, we need to face the fact that drugs will always find their way into our prisons. Once we have accepted that, we can develop strategies to ameliorate the harm they cause and assist prisoners with reintegrating.
“The system which applies in most country’s prisons systems has three legs to it. The first is prevention, that’s the prison administration doing everything possible to limit and minimise the amount of illegal drugs coming into the prison and that can be done by a wide variety of security methods. But no prison system can ever say it will prevent all drugs coming in. The steps which would have to be taken to achieve that would be so drastic as to be unacceptable. It would mean there would have to be absolutely no physical communication between prisoners and anyone from the outside, including family and prison staff and any other visitor.
“The second thing is to have a system of deterrence for dealing in an appropriate manner with any prisoners who are found to be abusing drugs and that’s normally through the disciplinary process. The third one relates to programmes or courses which will educate and deal with prisoners who have substance-abuse problems. That’s a combination of healthcare and courses on other social problems which will encourage them to stop using drugs.
If you regard those three things, prevention, deterrence and treatment as three legs of a stool, you need to have those three things in place. To have two of them without the third is not going to be successful and to concentrate overly on one at the expense of the other two is equally not going to be successful,” he says.
Bearing in mind the need to have these three elements in place, Coyle says that Scotland does perform reasonably well by international standards.
“It’s a truism but nonetheless it is the case that prisons reflect the reality of the outside world and given that one might say that if not a majority, then certainly a very large proportion, of people who are in prison have substance abuse problems and come from an environment where there is drug abuse, then if you really want to tackle these problems, then you can’t do it in a vacuum, you must also tackle the environment from which these prisoners come.
“And one has to say that in comparative terms, the Scottish Prison Service is regarded as being progressive in this respect. They work very hard, as they do in many other instances, to link in with resources and facilities in the community. It’s those three legs – they will work with the police, they will work with the healthcare people and with social workers and others. And also what I think the SPS is very conscious of is first of all, that many people who come into prison will come in with drug problems but also there’s little point helping prisoners to come off drugs inside prison if when they leave prison, they are going back into an environment where drugs are rife. So they are very conscious that they are in the middle of a continuum,” he says.
But this approach does not wash with some elements of our body politic. The Tories in particular say our prisons are a soft touch when it comes to drug use. They point to the American state of Pennsylvania as proof that a tough approach on drug use in prisons can bring real results.
There is no doubting that the Drug Interdiction Program launched by Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Correction Martin J. Horn in the mid-90s delivered improvements. The Pennsylvania jail system then was soaked in drugs, much of which was brought into the system by corrupt guards. Over 90 per cent of prisoners entering the system had drug-use issues and many simply continued inside from where they had left off. Overdoses were a regular feature of prison life, as was bribery of guards.
In 1994-95 Horn brought in a ‘zero tolerance’ strategy. A series of raids in prisons broke up smuggling networks and corrupt officers were arrested. Very frequent random urine tests of prisoners were introduced, and drug-sniffing dogs used on regular random raids of cells and landings. Those prisoners found with drugs or drugs in their system suffered harsh punishments. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PDC) also introduced highly sensitive drug detection equipment – called ion mobility spectrometers – that can detect minuscule trace elements of drugs to detect contraband that visitors or staff may try and bring into establishments.
These measures were accompanied by improvements to the drug-treatment facilities on offer in Pennsylvania jails. All of the state’s 24 prisons offer treatment, with seven facilities also offering therapeutic communities where inmates with serious addiction issues undergo intensive, long-term treatment and in 1997, the PDC opened its first dedicated substance-abuse prison.
Results were quick and impressive. Tests had been done at the introduction of the programme, and were then done again 24 months later. Drug finds as a result of cell searches dropped by 41 per cent from 1,866 to 1,109 and in a clear demonstration of the inextricable link between drugs and violence in jails, assaults on staff decreased by 57 per cent, inmate-on-inmate assaults fell by 70 per cent and weapons seized fell from 220 to 76.
Over the longer-term, the number of inmates testing positive for drugs fell from 7.8 per cent in 1996 to 1.4 per cent in 1998. At Graterford, the largest prison in the system and the Pennsylvanian equivalent of Barlinnie due to its proximity to Philadelphia, positive tests declined from 11.3 per cent to 1.1 per cent.
So could Scotland replicate Pennsylvania’s success in reducing drug use in prisons? Tory leader Annabel Goldie thinks we could and should, forthwith. But is all as it seems in Pennsylvania? What are the costs of their system and ten years down the track, are we actually a model for them?
Bill DiMascio, director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a charity group that aims to improve prison conditions, says that prisons have become safer for inmates since the changes, but at a cost:
“On balance, I believe the prisons have become safer. Prisoners have told me there are far fewer drugs inside, and this, of course, impacts the level of violence. Use of Ion Scan technology was what we saw most because it impacted visitors. Complaints have dropped off in recent years, but we were hearing horror stories about elderly women, mothers and grandmothers, testing positive for trace amounts of chemical substances on their hands or clothes and being denied admission to the prisons for routine visits. In some cases it was thought that individuals might come in contact with trace amounts of these substances merely be exchanging money. Still, they were denied entry.”
Prisoners and their families are punished in other ways too. Those in the Pennsylvania system who test positive for drugs are sent to solitary confinement for 90 days and lose contact visits with family for 180 days. Instead, visits take place through the kind of thick glass partition familiar from the movies. A second offence sees them lose such visits for one year while a third offence means no such visits for the remainder of a sentence.
In addition, those who test positive for drugs are moved to prisons far away from their home. Prisoners from Philadelphia being housed in Graterford are moved to prisons on the other side of the state, hundreds of miles away. As Horn told the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“If you get high and you’re from Philadelphia, we ship you west.”
It is this policy more than the others that concerns some Scottish observers. It is difficult to overstate the importance prisoners place on being close to their family, or home area.
“If you move people away from their families, then there are all sorts of other problems and you are probably storing trouble for yourself either in prison or when they come out,” says John Scott of the Howard League.
And that kind of trouble could be quite severe. One former prison governor in Scotland identifies the Strangeways takeover of 1990 as a key example of what can happen when prisoners are held away from their families for long periods.
There are other more practical reasons as to why the Pennsylvanian model would probably not work in Scotland – we simply can’t afford it.
“The existing support services and proper drug counselling resources are inadequate. So the trouble with introducing a system (random urine testing) is that inevitably you have to have some sort of penalties but if you expose the problems and someone wants help but there’s insufficient resources there to help them then all it’s about is punishment, it’s never going to actually help tackle the problem.
“That sounds rather too much like all stick and no carrot. I’ve got clients who say they are waiting to see a drug counsellor; in particular the medical services in prisons are swamped. I think to see a doctor, for example, is almost impossible; you need to have your leg falling off to see a doctor. With the nurses and the psychiatric nurses who deal with this, it sounds as though they are swamped. Just dealing with people identifying themselves (as problem drug users)is hard enough, dealing then with people who are identified through failing tests is going to be unmanageable,” says Scott.
Pennsylvania is also finding out that its policy is very, very costly and ironically, given the Tories public display of affection for its prison system, now going down the same route as the SNP, one the Tories routinely lambast.
The key issue is overcrowding. In 1990, Pennsylvania had a population of 22,000 that has risen to over 44,000 in 2006/07. In the same period, the costs of running the system spiralled from $US407m to $1.4bn. Horn’s replacement as Corrections Secretary, Jeffrey Beard, now says that ‘getting tough’ on drug offenders is counter-productive.
“There are ten to 15 years’ worth of studies showing that just locking up drug offenders or those who commit property crimes doesn’t work. Confinement alone, without addressing problems, is not an effective way of dealing with people,
Confinement alone, without addressing problems, is not an effective way of dealing with people, 
” he says.
But for the accent, it could be Kenny MacAskill saying those same words. The Pennsylvanian experience ties into the current debate about Scottish overcrowding. The majority of Scottish prisoners are serving short sentences, usually three months or less, and the SPS itself has said that it cannot offer any meaningful rehabilitation to prisoners serving less than 12 months. As Scott of the Howard League says, a 90-day stretch in solitary confinement will hardly deter someone doing two weeks from using drugs while inside.
There is no doubt that the Pennsylvania model is effective in dealing with drug use in prisons. But equally, it is an American model for an American system and American standards. Yet this does not mean we should immediately dismiss it all. We could yet take the diamonds and leave the dross.
“By far, the most effective way to reduce drug use in prison is to conduct regular random urine testing, though this will not allow for the detection of alcohol. The impact of random testing and graduated sanctions dwarfs the impact of other approaches like dog teams and ion detectors,” says David Farabee of the University of California at Los Angeles.
Yet the SPS argues that drug testing can be counter-productive. According to the Scottish Government’s recent strategy on illegal drug use:
“Over recent years the SPS has moved from a solely punitive approach of mandatory drug testing to a set of testing arrangements with clear purpose. Punitive responses to drug use, as happened under mandatory drug testing, have been found not to be a deterrent to drug users, had limited success as a trends and prevalence measure and did little to encourage problem users into treatment.”
Instead, says the SPS, “it is essential that integration and partnership working with local authorities, housing, families, social work, health and addiction services are well developed to support and promote a prisoner’s recovery, particularly after release from custody.”
For the Tories and those of their ilk, this is just more of the old failed same. But what would you have us do, ask their ideological opponents? Import an American idea that could potentially lead to riots and might be illegal anyway? Do we need to destroy our prisons to save them from drugs?
Farabee encapsulates the paradox quite neatly.
“The truth is, in prison and outside of prison, it is possible to reduce drug use and crime dramatically, but the financial and social costs would be too high,” he says.
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