Top four ways to smuggle drugs into prison

1. In your backside. Prison trousers are specially designed to be strong and small to try and prevent people discreetly slipping drugs into…and through their pocket at visiting time.

2. In a birthday card. Cut horizontally through a thick birthday card and lay your drugs as flat as possible inside the card before resealing the corner.

3. Swallowed – enough said.

4. In your shoe. Cut out a square inside your trainers before placing your packet inside and gluing it down again. Wear insoles for extra cover.


When someone is desperate and determined enough to get their heroine, cocaine or cannabis into prison it’s almost impossible to stop them. You can search prisoners, but you can’t check every piece of mail and you certainly can’t search every visitor. Even if the prison service had more resources it wouldn’t be worth spending them on tightening regimes to try and cut out drugs in prison completely.

Any resources would be far better spent on helping prisoners who want to ‘do their rattle’ and come off heroine whilst they are inside. Prison is lonely and can be a time of reflection. In the space that prison can provide we should be offering more people courses to help them understand when and why they use in preparation for when they get out.

Many prisoners come out with good intentions which are very quickly dashed, because either they:
- Don’t know how to cope with the uncertainties of freedom and so turn back to the only way they do know to regulate their fears.
- Have nowhere to live on leaving prison - the problems mount up and using is the obvious escape.

Prison is necessary to protect the public from a relatively small number of individuals who are a danger to the public. But for many a ‘short, sharp, shock’ simply disrupts any progress that is being made on the outside and leaves prisoners back at square one when they get out: without a secure or any home, in a cycle of drug use, theft and user-on-user violence.

Things are improving slowly. For instance, there is greater communication between the probation and prison service than there used to be and there is some preparation for outside life when you’re inside, but there is still a long, long way to go. There is frequent worried headshaking in the media that drugs are readily available in prison. They’d do better to be concerned that the help and preparation needed for successful living in mainstream society is not.