Lara jail failures

Contraband rife

A SMORGASBORD of drugs, weapons, needles and homemade booze is being seized from prisoners in the three prisons in Lara, which are all failing to meet drug testing benchmarks.

Maximum-security Barwon Prison, medium-security Marngoneet Correctional Centre and the Karreenga Annex all exceeded their governmentimposed random general benchmarks over 2018/19, Corrections Victoria’s latest Drugs in Prisons Report has revealed.

Barwon prisoners failed 8.45 per cent of random general drug tests during the 12month period, failing the prison’s 8 per cent benchmark — which was increased from 7.25 per cent last year.

Marngoneet returned the worst rate of positive results of all 17 Victorian prisons, with 9.42 per cent of random tests failed, well above the prison’s 6.5 per cent benchmark.

Karreenga prisoners failed 5.01 per cent of random tests, also beating its 3.5 per cent benchmark.

The Drugs in Prisons Report also found almost 290 litres of alcohol and home brew, 178 edged weapons, 46 syringes and needles and about 600 hits of heroin replacement drug buprenorphine were seized from prisoners.

The Opposition corrections spokesman, David Southwick, said the Premier needed to do more to control the use of drugs in the state’s prisons.

“Daniel Andrews refuses to acknowledge the current contraband crisis gripping our prisons, if he can’t acknowledge the problem, he certainly can’t fix it,” Mr Southwick said.

A spokesman for Department of Justice and Community Safety said keeping drugs out of prisons was critical to safe and secure prisons.

“The department remains vigilant in its efforts to detect illicit drugs in prisons with the use of barrier controls measures, drug-detection dogs, portable ion scanners and drugtesting,” the spokesman said.