The widespread availability of drugs in British prisons has long been among the more baffling conundrums of national life. How come institutions specifically built and managed to be secure have a drug problem that has, by common consent, reached crisis proportions? To put it another way, how can it be that places expressly designed to prevent people from getting out find it so difficult to stop illicit, and ever more harmful, substances from getting in?
The figures we report today are truly shocking – or they would be, were it not for the pervasive sense of resignation about everything that pertains to our prisons. The ubiquity of drugs then risks being seen as just one aspect of a disastrously failing system. It is more than that. It is at the root of many other prison problems.
Recorded at 21,145, annual drug seizures by prison officers in the year to March 2024 were more than 35 per cent up on the previous year, and nudging the record of 21,574 set four years before. Given the likelihood of undetected, or unchecked, possession, the figure for actual seizures is likely to understate the problem. In what comes perilously close to a concession of defeat, the Independent Monitoring Boards of prisons in the UK describe the movement of drugs into these institutions as “a seemingly unstoppable flow”.
There was a time when prison was seen as an opportunity to treat those with a drug habit. Success may have been limited, but it seems an even less realistic objective today. In our report, Mike Trace, head of a charity providing drug treatment in prisons and former drugs “Czar” in the Blair government, says the number of treatment programmes in prison, including drug-free wings, has been slashed from 110 in 2013 to just 15 now. It is by no means unheard of for offenders who entered prison clean to emerge from their sentence with a dependency likely to land them back behind bars.
No one, of course, would argue that freeing prisons from the scourge of drugs is simple. If it were, it would have been done long before now. The extent to which the problem has grown in recent years reflects a host of factors, from cuts to prison staffing under the austerity policies of previous governments – which resulted in the loss of many more experienced staff – to technological developments, such as miniature mobile phones and drones that allow inmates to circumvent more traditional prison security. Drones also facilitate deliveries of drugs in far greater quantities than would be possible via visitors or corrupt employees, and reduce the effectiveness of recently introduced X-ray scanners.
A further complication is the wider variety of illicit drugs in circulation, some being hard to identify, which can have more harmful effects than before. The consequence is an increase, both in emergency hospital admissions and in violence among inmates and towards staff. Reprisals for drug-related debts have become a particular problem – and these are debts, it should be stressed, that have been incurred in prison. In the past, it was sometimes argued that drug-taking was tolerated in some prisons because it could calm down otherwise under-occupied and frustrated inmates. That argument is less tenable now.
All these changes are well known to the prison authorities and those with monitoring and policy responsibilities. In our report, His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, is quoted as saying that drugs are the biggest challenge currently facing many prisons, and that it is “not acceptable that these levels of criminality are going on, unchecked”. He is right. It is not acceptable. But where is any real sense of urgency and direction to get to grips with such a pernicious and growing problem?
The government has embarked on what it bills as the biggest overhaul of the prison system in decades. In the short term, it is addressing prison overcrowding through an emergency programme of early releases. It has a longer-term schedule for building new prisons and welcomes talk about a greater focus on work and rehabilitation. So far, so modestly good.
But there is a lot of catching up to do, too – starting, perhaps, with better training, pay and status for prison staff. And it is hard not to detect a note of complacency in the response of the Justice Ministry to The Independent’s findings, which blamed past governments for the current situation, while asserting a “zero-tolerance approach to drugs” and “a clear impact” from the use of body scanners and drone no-fly zones.
We are, though, a year into the new government, and it is hard to detect that tolerance for drugs in prison is any closer to zero than it was before, while the impact of scanners and no-fly zones seems a lot less clear than the Justice Ministry insists. Eradicating drugs from prison altogether may be unrealistic, but it should be the ambition, and it needs to be pursued with a lot more urgency and application than has been in evidence so far.
