LAGS IN A HOLE LOT OF TROUBLE Drug smuggle cons drill walls like in movies’
Prison guard attacks soar
YOUNG cons smuggling drugs have been digging deep – into their cell walls.
Like in tunnelling scenes from hit film The Shawshank Redemption, the burrowing lags hollowed out holes to create a “rabbit warren” of compartments for contraband.
The cells were closed as soon as guards spotted the gaps, but the inmates soon made more.
A prison source said: “This wouldn’t be out of place in a prison movie. Prisoners can be incredibly creative when it comes to ways to get hold of their drugs.”
Several cons have faced sanctions for drilling the smuggling network, revealed in ITV’S fly-on-the-wall series Inside Prison: Britain Behind
Bars. At HMP Deerbolt, a male young offender institution in Barnard Castle, County Durham, Friday prayers had to be cancelled as worship was used as a cover to trade class A drugs.
After the show aired, a former prisoner, writing anonymously online, said the drug spice was routinely sold between cells – sometimes passed through gaps in several cell walls to get to the person who wanted it.
Hundreds of inmates have tested positive for drugs, the vast majority of them for spice. The show also exposed how outsiders lobbed drug-filled tennis balls with hooks on them over the fences. These were retrieved by cons from cells using string or sheets tied together.
A report by prison watchdog the Independent Monitoring Board found cell windows were broken or missing completely, allowing lags to pull up the drug parcels.
The report said: “Prisoners sent to Deerbolt from all over the country bring with them gang rivalries from different cities, which has contributed to increased violence, [ which is] also fuelled by a rise in the amount of drugs getting into the prison.
“Much of the violence is due to continuing high levels of bad debt. Mobile phones and drugs are continuing to be brought into the prison and distributed.”
A Prison Service spokesman said: “Cells at HMP Deerbolt are inspected daily and any damage is promptly repaired.”
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STAFF at Britain’s most violent prison have faced more than one attack a day.
Guards at HMP Birmingham (below) were assaulted 438 times in 2017-18, up from 65 times in 2010.There were 133 more staff assaults at the jail – taken over from private firm G4S last year by the Ministry of Justice – than any other prison.
Second worst was Peterborough, which had 305 attacks on officers in the year to March 2018. MOJ figures show 10,213 assaults on prison officers in England and Wales over that time.
Dave Todd, of the Prison Officers Association, said: “These figures are horrific. They clearly show the level of violence faced by prison officers on a daily basis across the system.”