More than 40,000 prisoners are drug users and more than 1,000 kg of drugs with an estimated street value of £100 million are being traded in prisons each year, Hussain Djemil, former head of drug treatment policy at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), told BBC Radio 4.

David Jameson, Chairman of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) at Wandsworth prison, told the programme that they did their own calculation of the internal drugs market. ‘A crude estimate on the value of drugs within Wandsworth is about £1 million a year … those figures may even be conservative’ he said.

The Government says that if you want to get a good indication of the level of drug use in prison, you only have to look at the number of prisoners testing positive in mandatory drug tests (MDTs). This has been steadily falling from almost 25 per cent in 1997 to just under 9 per cent today.

Critics of MDT’s say that there are several reasons why the positive tests are falling. Addicts buy urine from non-drug users as a way to cheat the test. Lord David Ramsbotham, who was Chief Inspector of Prisons for six years, believes there is another more significant reason for the fall. ‘I have quoted several times finding on a cell wall a man with nine certificates and I asked him what these were? He said that he didn’t use drugs and he was therefore tested regularly because it helped the Prison Service figures. Prison governors are judged on whether or not they have reduced drug taking. Now, this is nonsense and the Prison Service has got to be clear of the size and shape of its problem’.

If the Prison Service wants to really get a handle on its drug trade, Lord Ramsbotham says, ‘it has to tackle the most controversial supply route through staff.’

One former prison governor told Radio 4 that although the popular perception was that most drugs were brought into prison by families and friends visiting prisoners ‘more drugs are coming in with staff than any other way … it’s only a minority, you can count the number of staff on one hand’ he said.

Conservative MP Henry Bellingham, a member of the Shadow Justice team, told the programme that ’80 per cent of drugs coming into prison are coming in on members of staff.’ There are quite a few prisons where it is virtually impossible for drugs to come over the wall because of the way the perimeter fence and the buildings are positioned.
Hussain Djemil said he was also convinced that staff are ‘the main route of drugs into prison … they won’t systematically share intelligence between prisons ... and between prison areas and nationally’ he added.

The latest official figures show that in 2006, sixty-eight prison staff were suspended for trafficking drugs and other items. Lord Ramsbotham said that to end suspicion about prison staff the Government should set up an independent anti-corruption unit to investigate any allegation along the same lines as the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Trust in the Prison Service will be greater. ‘If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear’ he said.

The Prison Service’s highest profile case involved the suspension of fourteen officers at Pentonville prison in August 2006 on suspicion of drug trafficking and what it called inappropriate relationships. This was the largest number of officers suspended in living memory from any establishment and came just weeks after a leaked report to the BBC in which it was estimated that there were at least a thousand corrupt prison staff within the system.

Two years on, Gordon Cooper, Chairman of the IMB at Pentonville, told Radio 4 that to the best of his knowledge no criminal charges had been brought against any of the fourteen officers but added that the incidents of prisoners testing positive on MDTs’ went down quite significantly and the obvious inference from that is that the level of drugs within the prison dropped’ he said.

Drug treatment programmes in prisons are costing £70 million a year and thousands of prisoners are being weaned off drugs but that impressive work is being blunted by the inability of the Prison Service to stop hard drugs getting in. Hussain Djemil believes that it is time to root out the tiny minority of rogue officers. ‘It really is the elephant in the room’ he said.

‘The Metropolitan Police wanted to confront corruption and they had to go to extraordinary lengths to do it and I think that the Prison Service is at the crossroads and they may want to learn some lessons from the police services that have had to do this because of public scrutiny’.