This is Liz Bridge's submission to the House of Commons Justice Select Committtee inquiry into Tackling Drugs in Prisons. Liz is the former Quaker chaplain at Wandsworth Prison, Chair of trustees of Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust and one of the founders of the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign.
Scale and Impact
The extent of drug taking and availability has grown greatly during my ten-year prison experience, each year I have known more men to smoke drugs regularly and seen more men wandering about the prison with dead eyes, high on spice. What was once something different, a signal of failure and depression, has become a norm.
The demand is driven by boredom, and despair. Most men in HMP Wandsworth have little time out of their cell, and the accommodation is frequently, dirty, dark and old. Men used to come out to lessons and work, they could visit the library easily and exercise was dependably regular. The Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust had a great many distraction materials available in the prison and ran free book trolleys on every wing. Now men have almost nothing to do. There are few lessons which are rarely of the quality needed by any individual. The time out of cell is so limited that it is all used in getting to the shower and the kiosk. Men return to their cells with hours and hours to pass with nothing productive to do. The temptation to simply blot time out is overwhelming. Boredom is a primary factor driving demand for drugs.
The new synthetic drugs are above all cheap and therefore even with enormous profit margins made by dealers, they are affordable by the poorest and most desperate men. The low cost of manufacture means that any losses on route are an irrelevance to the merchants, who can continue to press on with the supply without any real financial loss to themselves when the prison interrupts their activities.
Impact on mental and physical wellbeing
Some men arrive in HMP Wandsworth without much experience of drugs and leave with a habit of regular use. They become experienced in all sorts of minor dealing, passing contraband, holding stuff for dealers, passing bank details, and trading goods. Many who wish to stay away for drugs are coerced into holding or hiding simply to stay safe from the traders with power. Men are coerced into letting money pass through their external bank accounts.
The drugs themselves are destructive for mental health. Men have no control over the amount they are taking and quickly become used to high levels. They can become paranoid, unable to communicate, unable to behave normally and with any discretion. They become victims not only of dealers but of any other prisoner who finds it easier to steal from them or to recruit them for violence or sexual favours because they are in debt and mentally unable to cope.
Addicts in prison who are going clean often put on weight, stand better, and begin to talk and form relationships. Sadly, in HMP Wandsworth one more often sees the reverse, men coming in clean and personable, and their humanity diminishing as drug use takes over.
Impact on Safety
Spice takers in the prison go into a zombie-like state where their posture and walking are affected, and awareness of others seems to have gone. I have known men get out on the netting of the wings and be left by officers because it would be too dangerous for three and four officers to go out and physically pick them up. It is also dangerous to attempt to catch them because their mood and behavior are so unpredictable and are no longer governed by the character or personality of the prisoner or social taboos. I have seen pleasant men become violent when it is not a normal part of their nature.
The result is that increased drug taking makes the prison far more unpredictable for both staff and other prisoners. Fights explode and even close friends and eyewitnesses have no clue what happened and why. Sometimes everyone hypothesises that they are about drug debts, but it can be that men are not aware of their surroundings and take offence at perceived slights which were not given or are just hallucinating.
Tackling supply
The most fashionable thing to focus on when talking about routes is drones. Drones are exciting and photogenic and make interesting subjects for newspaper articles and debate. I am sure that drugs do come in by drone. This is evidenced by sightings; noises audible to neighbours and general intelligence. But what is more interesting is that so little is done to prevent drone delivery. Guernsey Prison has installed a ‘Sky Fence’, and it is clear to anyone who reads about the defense systems used in Ukraine and Israel that defense establishments and airports can be protected. The necessary equipment must be purchased, installed and maintained, which is costly. In a prison setting the most important words here are ‘promptly maintained’. Nothing works if it is left broken.
There is also netting which similarly can reduce drone success. In Wandsworth I have seen netting damaged by prisoners and workmen and not replaced or mended for months. Good netting should be a priority, replaced daily if necessary but certainly promptly.
It sometimes feels as if the cost of maintained netting and drone sky fences are regarded as unaffordable, whilst the lives of inmates are cheap and disposable.
I have said that interest and blame given to drones is the current fashion. It obscures a much more difficult issue -the smuggling in of drugs by officers and civilian staff.
The profit margins on the sale of drugs in the prison beggar belief, and yet we recruit staff without an interview by a local governor and with almost no qualification except the absence of visible tattoos. Staff also come into the prison via the building and maintenance teams, and as delivery drivers. Local subcontractors are responsible for their vetting, and I suspect the prison has little control once a contract is in place. Food, bedding, clothes, and furniture are brought in in huge quantities and smuggling between inside and outside can quite obviously be arranged within deliveries.
What continues to shock me is that there is no random drug testing of staff and civilians entering prison. Dealers need to become acquainted with their couriers and to have something to offer to induce them to take the sort of risks smuggling involves. It has always seemed likely that those who know when and where the illicit parcels and packages are arriving, and who will collect and begin the distribution within the prison, have become known to the dealers because they are their users in the community.
In the construction industry and the oil industry it is now normal to test all workers without discriminating against site workers and office workers. It is a condition of employment because moving heavy materials and working at height is made more dangerous if you or the man next to you are drunk or drugged. I do not see why similar reasoning cannot be applied in a prison.
A prison is a dangerous place where workers need to remain observant at all times and where violence can erupt at any time. How sensible to ensure that no one in any position of trust is limited in function by drugs or drink. How natural to spot test randomly, with loss of employment as a consequence of being caught. But this is never done.
Much focus is placed on the body scanning and searching of visitors and officers arriving at the gate. In my experience this is now done fairly efficiently. There are scanners and body checks for visitors and officers alike. The sort of volumes of drugs and phones and illicit stuff that are found in the prison are very unlikely to be walked in through the public gate simply on grounds of weight and bulk -we are talking many kilos of illicit items. The focus on the ‘foot passengers’ may be a distraction from the real problem. The bulk of illicit items are probably coming in with the lavatory seats and the potatoes and the maintenance machinery, hidden where no scanner goes, to someone on the inside who knows when and where, and who knows where to put it on the next stage of its journey. Smuggling needs chains where everyone does a bit, and the bit they do looks entirely normal. If one remembers the prisoner who escaped from Wandsworth, he was employed to meet the Bidvest lorry with his forklift truck. What if he had decided it would be profitable to build up an external bank account by working for a dealer outside when he helped unload the lorries. Lorries come in every day in large numbers bringing boxes which cannot be scanned or searched but which come from trusted suppliers/subcontractors. Once illicit goods are inside the prison, you need a chain to move the contents from the arrival point in the prison staffed by admin workers /officers and to deliver them to the prisoner’s contacts to start the prisoner chain.
The problem is not penny numbers, it is a sort of Amazon delivery system , and there may be people, probably trusted officers, who never touch a consignment at all, but who advise the dealers who to approach as chains fail, who know where illicit goods can be put overnight etc. (Anyone who works in the prison can open a storeroom or a kit room, so goods can be put somewhere by one person and locked away, and someone who does not know even know the previous person can open and pick up.)
The profits here are enormous, so the corruption and organisation are extensive. The chains one can observe, of drugs moving prisoner to prisoner, must be mirrored by movements done by employed staff to get parcels in through the gate and out to wing dealers. The prison focuses on the prisoner chains, but work needs to be done on the through the gate team. Can we consider financial rewards to whistle blowers which would outprice the dealers? And can we look at the protection available to whistleblowers? In my experience whistleblowers in the prison are quickly known to all and are therefore in considerable danger.
Tackling Demand
The prison security department, in its attempts to tackle supply, exacerbates demand by limiting access to interesting and purposeful activity. Access to books, colouring, yoga mats is severely restricted and the prison searches cells sometimes very invasively. Men who are not well, or mentally unstable are taken out of cells and the cells searched and excess property like extra blankets and mattresses removed. No one is given anything to do. When wings are closed for searches, there is no access to free flow and lessons, boredom levels are increased.
Far better access to books, jigsaws and construction toys is needed and the prison needs to be imaginative and consider art lessons, language lessons on prison TV, and simple games that give two men sharing a cell something to talk about and do. The demand for drugs arises from the utter monotony and boredom of life lived under the current constraints on the regime.
Are existing measures effective? And post release?
Existing measures like drug free wings are rarely effective. In the common gossip of the prison, they are an easy target for dealers because self-confessed users are congregated together. This makes delivery easier! The men on these units often have jobs which allow them to move freely about the prison and corruption and illicit supply occurs.
I am not saying that drug free areas should not be tried or should be stopped, but that the pride taken in their success is unwarranted and the prison service make false claims of their success. The aim should be to reduce the demand and to reward those who show drug free on regular tests. Men in the prison receive very little spending money unless they are lucky enough to be offered work, and the rates of pay for work are very low. Many can barely afford their vapes, shower gel and biscuits, especially those who take spice.
Giving men extra money for a drug free test would illustrate the priorities of a Governor. Regularly testing high numbers of prisoners would show which wings, which landings, were in trouble with drugs and allow officers and security to focus on possible sources of supply.
I fear that again we are talking about budgets, and that observing the destruction of lives by drugs is cheaper than bulk drug testing, and the use of drug testing with incentives for drug free testing.
The Government plan From Harm to Hope is little more than a dream. Many drug workers working in the prison struggle against the odds to achieve improvement, but frequently they have little to offer. The addict is held cooped up, sharing with another addict, is offered little life or interest out of his cell, knows that he will leave to homelessness or a poor-quality hostel, and leaves with little money or hope. If we want rehabilitation we have to achieve:
More accommodation available for ex-addicts at release
Financial incentives for those who have negative drug tests.
Plans for release which avoid men released with no prescription nor any idea how to get the medication they need in the community or where the pharmacy is which holds their prescription.
Conclusion
I want no drugs in HMP Wandsworth, but the current priorities are wrong.
We make little attempt to give men purposeful activity.
There is poor education and little or no therapeutic art or craft.
The officers search in a manner that unsettles many occupants and results in punishment for low life in the drug network, but rarely if ever catches an organizer.
The officers and civilian staff are not drug tested themselves.
There are no financial incentives for informants
Whistleblowers are not protected well.
The netting is not maintained.
There is no Sky Fence to prevent drones.
There are no financial incentives for prisoners who are drug free on random tests.