Life on the front line of prison’s battle to win the war against drug smugglers
Day three in our series of special reports to mark Prisons Week looks at the lengths prisoners and visitors go to get contraband into Maghaberry
The sleight of hand was too quick for the untrained eye to see as the drug-carrying visitor slipped a tablet to the prisoner sitting opposite him at a table in Maghaberry jail. But before the inmate could swallow the pill, a fleet-footed prison officer intervened and grabbed it from him.
Even in several re-runs of the CCTV footage during a behindthe-scenes visit to Maghaberry, the ‘pass’ was almost imperceptible.
It emphasised just how hard it is for even the most vigilant staff to win the battle of wits against drug smugglers who will go to any lengths to try and keep their contraband out of the hands of the search teams.
Even children have been used on “very rare” occasions to get drugs into Maghaberry, according to prison sources.
But it’s not just the visitors who use every trick in the book — and some that aren’t even in it yet — to outfox staff.
Prisoners returning from home visits also regularly attempt to smuggle drugs, which are even bigger business inside the jail than outside it.
A number of prison officers have been arrested on suspicion of drug-dealing too.
Last year, one was alleged to have tried to bring cocaine and cannabis into the jail in his boots.
But the majority of visitors who attempt to smuggle contraband — be it drugs or mini mobile telephones — do so by secreting it in their own bodies.
It doesn’t take an anatomical expert to work out how and where they hide their drugs, but among the most popular containers are Kinder eggs, crammed full of drugs and hidden in the smugglers’ nether regions.
The little plastic containers are widely used to bring drugs into music festivals, as well as prisons.
A woman who appeared in court in Scotland recently was found with £3,300 of cocaine and 58 ecstasy tablets worth nearly £600 in a Kinder egg.
In Maghaberry, one prisoner was found to have seven Kinder eggs inside him. They contained 1,200 tablets.
Earlier this year at the jail, another prisoner had five Kinder eggs wrapped in condoms in his body, each packed with Xanax tablets. Staff had intelligence about what he was planning to do on his return from a temporary release programme.
Prison governor Dave Kennedy, a former security governor at Maghaberry, said: “You can do a full-body search and use technology like hand-held devices, but the drugs may not be detected. The prisoner in this case was held in isolation in the CSU — the care and settlement unit — but he refused to give up his drugs.
“He held on for a long time, but eventually he did relent. We were prepared to sit him out for as long as it took.”
Over the past year, 2,500 random drugs tests were carried out in Maghaberry, and the authorities say that 75% of prisoners were clear, which they insist proves their initiatives work.
Inmates who fail the tests are given the chance to avoid punishment by signing up to programmes to tackle drug taking behaviour or substance abuse in the jail which, in 2015, was branded the most dangerous that a prisons inspector had ever seen in the UK.
Concerns were expressed over drugs at the jail, which the inspector, Nick Hardwick, likened to a Victorian-era prison, saying Charles Dickens could write about Maghaberry “without batting an eyelid”.
A new report is due soon after another inspection was carried out, and it is clear that prison officials are expecting a more favourable assessment.
Despite the successes in thwarting the trafficking, drugs are still a major concern at Maghaberry, where security — even for visitors who are not going to see prisoners — is tight.
I was photographed and issued with a swipe card to use in tandem with a hand recognition system before I could even proceed to an airport-style scanner. Mobile phones are not allowed and are instead locked away in safety deposit boxes.
During a tour of the jail, I had to go through a series of turnstiles and more hand recognition procedures before I was able to spend several hours meeting the people who are in the vanguard of the battle to curb the drugs trade in the prison.
Seeing CCTV footage of recent visits illustrated that visitors and prisoners will do virtually anything to get drugs into Maghaberry.
Reading body language is a vital weapon in the prison officer’s armoury.
In one CCTV clip, prison staff, who had intelligence that a visitor was a drug smuggler, ordered him to open his mouth. Their suspicions that he had a tablet in there were confirmed when he reluctantly spat it out.
In another recording, a female visitor was seen reaching into her bra, removing a pill and slipping it into her mouth, before kissing the prisoner she had come to see.
It was all over in a nanosecond, but more drugs were later found on her.
The kiss-offs, however, are not restricted to husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends.
Prison sources have seen mothers give their sons openmouthed kisses for one reason and for one reason only” — transferring drugs.
Even hard men have got up close and personal, so to speak,
❝ You can do a full body search and use hand-held devices, but the drugs may not be detected
with each other to pass drugs mouth-to-mouth.
Staff also have to be alert to attempts to take drugs into the jail in other ways.
Footwear had been brought to Maghaberry for a prisoner, but staff discovered that the trainers had been altered to include storage spaces for drugs.
Coats have also had special sections sewn into them to make room for contraband.
Passive drugs dogs are also on the front line in the war on drugs. Officials aren’t keen to discuss how many dogs they have at Maghaberry, but the animals are trained to walk past visitors and sit down beside anyone they think has been in contact with drugs.
Those people will then be offered a closed visit, where screens deny them any physical contact with the inmates that they have come to see. The same can apply to people who have been caught smuggling drugs in the past or who are under suspicion of bringing contraband into Maghaberry.
During the visit, I was shown some of the drugs that were discovered in 325 separate searches during the last year, ranging from small to major finds. More than 100 of them were discovered in the CSU.
Prescription drugs have been among the most commonly seized items.
However, not all the drugs are actually smuggled into the jail at all. Some of them are legitimately prescribed to prisoners, and there have been regular reports of inmates stockpiling painkillers, anti-depressants and anti-psychotic pills.
A recent report said that prescribing rates for English and Welsh prisoners had soared by 137% in six years.
It also said that some prisoners who received their drugs under supervision had found ways of storing them in their mouths and throats — and on returning to their cells regurgitating them, to stockpile or pass them on to others.
Throughout Maghaberry, the threats still faced by staff from dissident republicans are such that they don’t want to have their names or photos published.
But several of them spoke about how they have found drugs after noticing erratic or nervous behaviour by prisoners or visitors.
One said: “We’re always watching out for the ones who are shifty and looking around them, but they’re quite easy for a camera operator to spot.
“You’re always looking for the tell-tale signs that indicate that something is about to be handed over.
“Sometimes visitors will put a tablet into a roll of sweets that appear to be innocently offered to a prisoner.”
Another officer said the drug battle could be a matter of life and death.
“A lot of these prisoners don’t actually know what they’re taking, and we need to try to stop them from swallowing what’s given to them,” he explained.
“They might think it’s a bit of cannabis, but people from the outside could be passing them anything.”
He added that officers also study new trends and patterns in the drugs trade outside the jail “because what happens there will sooner or later be reflected on the inside”.
Mr Kennedy admitted that a vast amount of resources were devoted to cracking down on drugs in Maghaberry, but said there was a powerful motivation behind the zero tolerance policy.
He added: “These drugs, if they got through, would have a very bad impact on a large number of people in the jail.
“You can imagine the damage that would be done if someone got hundreds of tablets into a recreation room or a yard and distributed them to a large number of prisoners.
“That would mean a few very bad days on a couple of landings in a residential house, and it would take us to the start of the next week before we could get back to normal there.
“Drugs are a scourge and a societal problem. Any financial gains that anyone would get from the drugs would happen on the outside, not in the jail. Money is no use to anyone in the prison.”
Mr Kennedy said his security department was better trained and better focused on detecting contraband, including drugs, than ever before.
“The staff are all over the problem,” he insisted.
He said that he and his staff were totally committed to fulfilling the targets set in Stormont’s programme for government and their own Prisons 2020 strategy, but said the scale of the task facing them at Maghaberry is massive.
This, he added, is underlined by the fact that 4,000 prisoners are committed to the jail every year and there are 600 visits every week.
In one year alone, there were 33,500 visits, involving a total of 62,000 people.
I visited offices at the nerve centre of the anti-drugs operation at Maghaberry, including one where intelligence teams are based and where a PSNI officer liaises with prison staff, with the flow of information going both ways.
“Intelligence is the key,” said Mr Kennedy.
“It’s satisfying that no major amounts of drugs have been brought into the jail in the last few years, but people still try to get small amounts in.”
There are several thousand cameras across the prison, which occupies a 150-acre site near Moira.
The footage is monitored from a control room and, during visits, camera operators instinctively home in on any suspicious encounters in the visiting area.
But Mr Kennedy said that the changes in the running of Maghaberry since the damning 2015 report have involved more than just security.
He added: “One of the big problems three years ago was that there was no consistency in the jail, and the operation of the prison was unpredictable.
“Prisoners didn’t know what was happening with their day. They didn’t know, for example, if they were getting out of their cells in the morning, or if they would be able to make phone calls.
“But now, most of the 800-plus prisoners here know what activities they’ll be doing day-to-day, giving a positivity and structure which will be full and productive.”
No major amounts of drugs have been brought into the jail in the last few years, but people still try