AROUND the world, prisons have become the sites of major outbreaks of coronavirus, with thousands of prisoners testing positive for COVID-19 and tensions running high among inmates and prison guards who fear the virus as a possible death sentence.
By mid-March, NSW Corrective Services had a series of coronavirus measures under way, including a suspension of all personal visits to prisoners, work release and community work schemes.
Other states and territories have corresponding arrangements, and apart from a small outbreak among prison officers at a Brisbane jail in early April, the nation's prison population appears to have been successfully isolated from infection.
So successfully, that a series of coronavirus-related protests have taken place at various prisons across NSW and interstate, the latest of which took hold at Cessnock Correctional Centre yesterday.
Prison sources said the protests - as expected - were over the suspension of personal contact visits, which have been replaced by what authorities describe as a pilot program of video visits for family and friends.
Perhaps surprisingly, Corrective Services told the Newcastle Herald yesterday afternoon that the Cessnock rioters had taken action because they wanted access to the jail's "opioid substitution" program, because the loss of contact visits had stopped the supply of drugs that the authorities are normally loathe to admit are available in their prisons.
It should be remembered there is no independent verification, as yet, that this is the case.
But if it is, it brings into the open a situation that is usually swept under the carpet: the steady supply of drugs in prisons, no matter what counteractive measures are put in place.
In recent decades, the opioid program has expanded its scope.
Jail sources say that about 30 per cent of Cessnock's 1500 inmates are on methadone with about 5 per cent on a newer treatment, buprenorphine.
They say similar percentages exist across the state's 13,000 full-time prisoners.
Expanding the jail's methadone supply might be an easy answer to keep the peace, but supplying a highly addictive drug - even if it's prescribed - without absolute necessity, creates a moral problem for the prescriber, and a physical one for the inmate.
Jail must punish offenders, but it is also supposed to rehabilitate them.
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