JAILS GRAPPLE WITH DRUGS
Treated paper can go for $400 per square inch
Jails and prisons in Massachusetts grappling with synthetic drugs flowing in from the outside recently moved to strategies such as scanning all mail to prevent attempts like the one a Boston official allegedly played a part in.
“Synthetic cannabinoids in incarcerated settings are now a widespread problem in Massachusetts prisons,” Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office wrote in its statement of the case in a recent bust that made headlines because it involved charges against Boston mayor’s office Administration & Finance Director Freda Brasfield.
Sheriffs offices and experts tell the Herald much the same: The mail has been the latest frontier in the eternal cat-and-mouse game of trying to stop drugs from entering prisons as paper treated with synthetic or “conventional” drugs or even over-thecounter chemicals.
Basically, any drug that’s water soluble can be used to treat paper. When it’s done well, it’s difficult to tell that the sheet’s any different from any other bit of mail. A letter from a friend or family member or a picture colored in by a kid, the sheriffs say, can be, as the AG wrote, “disguised as letters, including fake legal mail, and smuggled into prisons either through the
mail system or on the persons of visitors.”
And it’s quite lucrative. One normal-sized piece of paper can be cut up into at least eighty-eight one-inch squares, which the AG’s office says can go for $400 each inside the prison — “which means that one sheet of paper can conceivably generate up to $35,200.”
The Massachusetts Department of Corrections, the state agency in charge of prisons including MCI Shirley, the high-security one involved in recent high-profile particular bust, didn’t have much to say. The DOC wouldn’t make anyone available all week to talk about drugs in prisons, and it said any data about drug seizures would have to come through a formal records request.
A spokesman did say that drugs, “including the recent increase of synthetic cannabinoids,
pose a consistent challenge for correctional institutions nationwide.”
The DOC said it requires pre-screening of visitors and takes multiple different steps to “thwart contraband” from entering the facilities by the mail: it photocopies normal mail coming to inmates and gives them the copied version, and it uses drug-sniffing dogs at most high- and medium-security prisons, like Shirley.
Will Plummer, chief security officer at RaySecur, a company that works with prison systems on drug detection, said synthetic compounds, sometimes called K2 or spice, exacerbate this problem.
“This is the top of every list from every security director we talk to,” Plummer told the Herald. “The security industry, generally speaking, doesn’t have an effective way to keep up with synthetics.”
In the early 2010s, “bath salts” and other synthetic drugs had a burst of headlines, mostly involving people acting bizarrely, dangerously or even, in a couple of instances, cannibalistically. Around that same time, former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, imprisoned for murder, killed himself, and some reports said he’d been smoking synthetic cannabinoids in prison, though others disputed that.
Now, authorities say, as opioids and meth dominate the normal-drug trade and you can just go to the store to buy pot, these synthetics are less a creature of the streets and more of the cell blocks, where the chemical compounds are always in flux, Plummer said.
“Chemical compounds change and then it’s completely ineffective,” the former Army bomb tech said of typical techniques.
Sheriffs offices, led by elected officials who oversee county jails, say they’re also dealing with the problem of drugs in the mail in general, though to different extents.
“The mail has been the
hardest thing,” Assistant Superintendent Rachelle Steinberg of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office told the Herald.
Suffolk, like the state, goes the photocopying route, delivering clean versions of the contents of the mail and the envelope it came in.
The other type of correspondence is legal mail, which can’t be opened before it gets to the recipient. Steinberg said in Suffolk they have staff open it there and take a look when it’s delivered.
“We are always looking to try to eliminate a loophole,” Steinberg said. “It’s just trying to stay ahead of it. You’re always chasing the next thing.”
The new Bristol County sheriff, Paul Heroux, said drugs in the jail are “huge — a big problem,” and that people inside periodically overdose and have to be revived.
But he said his office doesn’t photocopy mail,
and has no plans to. Rather, he said he’s beefing up the drug-snuffing dog squad, going from five to seven, in an effort to have that unit handle both the mail and random screenings of people going in and out.
“They get very creative with things, but the dogs will detect that stuff,” Heroux said.
In Plymouth County, though, Sheriff Joe McDonald said the photocopying protocol has largely done away with the normal mail as a vector for drugs, and he said they’re not seeing a problem with legal mail, which Plummer had identified as another tricky spot.
“If you would have called me a few years ago, I would have told you it’s a major problem,” McDonald said of the normal mail. “But I think we’ve been able to keep one step ahead of these guys.”
He said they keep the original letters after giving inmates the photocopies, and then when people get out of jail they get the originals back.
These days, he said, the focus is on drugs coming in from court, as the jail population goes in and out more often than those in prison.
“It’s been largely abated, but it doesn’t mean it’s over with,” said McDonald of the mail issues. He said he’d been interested to hear about the recent DOC bust: “Don’t just learn from your mistakes, but also from other people’s.”
Every sheriff’s office employee who oversees these types of operations seems, when asked by the Herald, to have some go-to story about a different weird way drugs got into jail. The adhesive on the back of a stamp in Norfolk County? A child’s crayon drawing covering up some yellowstained suboxone-drenched paper in Suffolk County? The Christmas card that guards noticed had nibbles taken out of it in Plymouth County?
Not everyone is thrilled by the strategies jails and prisons have taken. In other states, some jail administrations have faced lawsuits from inmates-rights groups and other civil-liberties organizations, saying the government doesn’t have the right to deny people their property.
Here in Massachusetts, Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts Executive Director Elizabeth Matos said in a statement to the Herald, “Devoting resources to scanning mail while insufficiently addressing the underlying causes of substance use is a misuse of resources.”
“Resources would be far better spent on meaningful substance use and mental health treatment, which incarcerated people and their loved ones have been calling for for decades,” she said. “Although the state has recently dedicated more funds to treating opioid addiction in correctional facilities, the rollout has been painfully slow and is still unavailable in some of the state’s largest prisons.”
The Brasfield case has put the topic of drugs in prisons in the spotlight.
Here’s the initial characterization of the alleged conspiracy, per the AG’s office: “Upon further investigation, investigators became aware of inmates (defendants Keenan Brasfield, Shakwaan Simpkins, Christian Rosado, and Luis Saldana) at MCI-Shirley coordinating with non-incarcerated relations or significant others (defendants Freda, Brasfield, Jamie Liberty, Jayleen Rivera, Krystal Adorno, and Kimberly Olson) to negotiate the purchase and delivery of synthetic cannabinoids from a former inmate, defendant Manuel Dasilva.”
The AG’s office claims various members of the group tried multiple ways of getting drugs into prison, including an attempt to mail in paper treated with chemical compounds at one point, and multiple attempts for outsiders to bring drugs in. The prison caught on when it began picking up on “suspicious” phone calls, according to the AG’s statement of the case.
As for Brasfield, the longtime Boston official, she isn’t accused of directly trying to sneak drugs into prison, but prosecutors allege she helped coordinate some payments. She was arraigned last month on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Brasfield maintains her innocence; she’s pleaded not guilty, and her attorney has said she’s “wrongfully charged.” The case shocked many in City Hall, where she’s been a wellknown presence going back to the Menino era — and, at the time she was placed on unpaid leave earlier this month, the recipient of a $130,000 salary as the administration and finance director for Mayor Michelle Wu’s office operations.