first published in Taking Liberties, the bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross
no copyright - if using any of this article, please credit to Andrew Green and quote web address
Contents
A serious problem
Controlling prisoners
The economy of drugs
The Prison industry
Dealing with drugs
Despite frequent random and targeted drug testing of prisoners, the imposition of strict penalties against those who test positive (and the probable consequence for them that they won’t get parole); despite intrusive and meticulous searches of visitors and of prisoners, drugs continue to be more readily available inside prison than out.
Prisoners become addicted while they’re inside. ABC activists have come to know prisoners well, know that they never touched hard drugs before they went inside, and now see them, friends and comrades, using heroin because they are inside. Prison is not only taking them from us, but giving them a physical dependency, changing them into something they don’t want to be. One ex-prisoner said he’d never even seen heroin before he went inside. He was offered it there, and because he was bored and depressed, he tried it. "Luckily I didn’t like it," he said. "Otherwise I’d be a junkie now." As Judge Tumin said of Styal prisoners: "enter a shoplifter and leave an addict."
We are not passing judgement on drug use or drug users. It isn’t our business what drugs people choose to take. What makes us angry is seeing people, especially people we have come to know and respect, made vulnerable by prison, pushed into hard drug taking, and thus linked to the organised crime that serves the interests of the state. Michael Howard [then Home Secretary] is doing his best to turn our mates into junkies. What better way of permanently reducing their effectiveness?
Yet prisoners are not stupid. They are very angry at what is being done to them, cynical of the claims of officials and politicians - they are, potentially, radical if not revolutionary. If we want to know how they feel, to hear what they can tell us, we have to intervene and give help when it’s needed.
A serious problem
In 1989, 6500 people were said to be drug dependent on entry to prison. This official figure is probably accurate. If prisoners are addicted when they enter the prison system, then it is in their interest to say so, because they (unlike those who become addicted while inside) will not be punished but be given medical treatment: this however is always much more limited than they would receive outside, in the NHS, and so withdrawal problems are likely to make them start to use illegal drugs: the effect of NHS treatment is likely to be reversed by prison (DI 4)*. So the Home Office estimates that the number of drug addicts in prison is now 3000. The others have vanished from the statistics, even if they remain addicts. This and all other figures for illegal drug users in prison are necessarily underestimates, because punishment for drug use must cause at least some prisoners to refuse to admit use.
Offical reports say drugs are more available inside prison than outside. The finding of the famous 1995 report on Styal women’s prison by Judge Tumin, then Chief Inspector of Prisons, which said that inmates and staff agreed that drugs were freely available inside and that inmates had been introduced to drugs for the first time while inside, has been repeated for many prisons, from Cornton Vale (Scotland’s women’s prison) to The Wolds (the first prison to be run by a private company). Many prisoners writing to ABC groups have confirmed that in the prisons where they are held, drugs continue to be more available, and cheaper, than on the streets of, say, Moss Side or Brixton, and that they were offered hard drugs for the first time when inside.
Several recent studies of drug use in prison suggest that about 10% of male prisoners and 11% of female prisoners are drug dependent. In a prison population of 60,000 that means over 6000 addicts - but this figure is certainly an underestimate and the number is rapidly rising. A major reason for this is the switch from soft drugs to hard drugs. Many prisoners used harmless drugs like cannabis before entering prison, and continue to use drugs to make life bearable inside. But if they wish to continue drug use, they are forced to change to hard drugs to reduce the risk of detection through random drug tests. The increase in hard drug use in prison is a direct consequence of the introduction of mandatory drug testing designed (so politicians and prison officials claim) to reduce drug use in prison.
A prisoner from Perth, Brian Hosie, wrote to Inside Time (Summer 1996): "prisoners who once took a smoke of hashish to get them through a black spot of tedium are now going over to more and more harder drugs that are out of their system in days rather than weeks…" Even Home Office research recorded "some disquiet" that inmates were switching to hard drugs for this same reason, and that prison staff were aware of the fact (DI 7). The reason is simply that traces of cannabis can remain detectable in the body up to 30 days after consumption, while heroin and cocaine are out of it in only two days and amphetamines are out in 2 - 4 days (DI 12). This information spread throughout the prison grapevine as fast as the tests were introduced. Nor was it a secret, known only to prisoners. Screws, experts and the civil servants all know that random mandatory testing must increase hard drug use in prison, and if the politicians don’t know this, it’s because they’re wilfully ignorant or stupid. Or both.
Controlling prisoners
Those who study prisons have long accepted that prisons cannot function unless inmates co-operate with guards. It would be prohibitively expensive for the state to run prisons if prisoners were always obstructive. Drugs have long formed a means of ensuring the docility of prisoners - prison administrators have depended on them. Drugs used range from the legal (tobacco as prisoner-controlled internal currency), to the medical (tranquillisers and psychotropics) and illegal (alcohol brewed inside prison). Prisoners regarded as especially troublesome got a heavy - and dangerous - dose of tranquillizers by forcible injection, known as the ‘liquid cosh’. All those drugs are still in use, alongside the other illegal drugs which have become more prominent. Drugs in prison accumulate and spread rather than replacing each other. Illegal drugs are just one means of control available to screws along with legal drugs, conventional disciplinary tools from loss of remission to strip cells and body belts, and the establishment of internal hierarchies through a network of dealers - in tobacco or illegal drugs, enforced by favours and brutality.
According to Paddy Joe Hill, the prisons he was in over 17 years were awash with home-made alcohol. But alcohol has its drawbacks - drunk prisoners can be violent and disruptive, and prisoners, not screws, control its production and distribution. Howard’s policies promised that prisons would be soon badly overcrowded, while economies were forcing cutbacks in staffing levels and prisoner privileges and distractions, like education. Illegal drugs offered a solution. It’s easier for screws to control supply and distribution, because drugs have to be brought in, and since they are much more compact than alcohol, it’s more feasible to smuggle them in. By 1992, Judge Tumin was reporting that not only were prisoners openly drinking home made alcohol in front of staff in Long Lartin, but hard drugs were easier to find inside the prison than out - as they were in Wymott, where they were openly on sale. In 1994, Anthony Middleton reported in The Big Issue (105) on the wide availability of cannabis in prisons. "Undoubtedly cannabis makes prisoners more acquiescent," said Stephen Shaw of the Prison Reform Trust. "I would think that any prison warder would want prisoners to take cannabis rather than prison-brewed alcohol." Prison officers were said to turn a blind eye to its use and even to deal it in themselves, to make their job easier. Occasionally screws have been caught and themselves jailed for dealing. And there was a suggestion that they might "collude" with prisoners to prevent disorder when testing was introduced, so that the peaceful situation could continue. An official report blamed the 1994 riot in Everthorpe on a crackdown causing a shortage of drugs in the Humberside prison.
In Inside Times’ 1995 survey, equal numbers (44%) of prisoners reported that they had had access to alcohol and hard drugs, but hard drugs were much more frequently available than alcohol, and cannabis continued to be more readily available than either. But Tumin’s headline-grabbing reports had geared up Michael Howard’s new prison agency to prevent prisoners from being stoned out of their minds every night on the drug of their choice. The Criminal Justice Act 1994 gave screws legal power to make prisoners give piss samples for drug testing, and by March 1996 mandatory, random drug testing was routine in all prisons. Cannabis makes possible the economical control of prisons, but does little to change its users. Drug testing changes drug use, giving the same control to screws, making prisoners docile, while creating drug-dependent users committed to crime, who also remain amenable to control. The state is prepared to spend £4.2 million a year on drug testing, although as a means of discovering the extent of the drugs ‘problem’ or of reducing it, the drug testing system is worthless. Its inaccuracy is notorious.
One academic study says that 5-10% of tests give wrong results, both false positives and false negatives. The number of reports that ABC and other organisations receive suggests that the tests are even less accurate. Some prisoners substituted tap water for piss and the tests gave a positive result for the presence of drugs (what do they put in prison tap water?). Prisoners can have another test done by a laboratory, but they have to pay for it - we understand the cost is £18, a lot of money for a prisoner and more than most have available. The laboratory test is not necessarily any more reliable.
Brian Hosie (Inside Time Summer 1996) wrote:"I have knowledge of prisoners who have been taking drugs heavily and yet their test came back negative… In another instance, three drug users used a clean prisoner’s urine and the result was that two came back negative and the third proved positive for alcohol!" Now prisoners have to piss in a jar while screws watch, which doesn’t make the test more accurate but prevents prisoners from showing how inaccurate it is.
Prison officials are gullible, and private companies are always selling them security devices that cost a lot and don’t work properly. Drugs tests are just another of these. But the £4.2 million isn’t wasted. The fact that the tests are crap doesn’t matter: they are simply another means of control. Prisoners tell us that they are not in practice particularly random - some prisoners are tested quite often, others not at all. They are very much under the control of the screws, and so wide open to the fabrication of results. Prisoners can be instantly fitted up, with incontrovertible scientific evidence against them instantly available. A copper’s dream.
The economy of drugs
If the state contributes £4.2 million toward this scheme of control, then prisoners and their friends probably contribute even more. Illegal drugs make control possible literally at the expense of those subject to control. But who gets the money? The answer depends on who brings drugs in.
We are constantly told that it’s visitors who bring drugs in. Those of us who visit prisons frequently know that can’t be true. We are no longer to allowed to take anything in, such as pens, unsealed packets of cigarettes (sometimes not even those), nappies for babies we may have with us. Purses, wallets, coats and shoes pass through a sophisticated X-ray machine, while we go through a sensitive metal dietector. Then we’re rubbed down in a mildly embarrassing fashion - although some people (we’ve only heard of it happening to women) are subject to full strip searches. If you were stupid and reckless, you might get a tiny quantity of drugs through, in your mouth or a thick bit of clothing. You’d then have to pass it over to a prisoner a few feet away from a screw who has nothing to do but watch you, underneath a TV camera. The prisoner must then get it through a further search, which may include an internal body search, which may be videoed. It’s simply impossible for the large quantities of drugs consumed in prisons to be taken in by visitors.
That leaves service workers and screws to bring drugs in. The allegation that screws bring drugs in has been made before. In Inside Times’ survey in 1995 (before testing was widespread),14% of respondents said they got their drugs from visitors and only 12% got them from screws. But 64% got them from other prisoners, and 31% wouldn’t say who supplied them. And the survey says nothing about quantities. A few screws could be bringing in large quantities, and supplying the dealers inside. There are serious allegations that they bring in other things. It’s been forcibly argued (by Mike Mansfield on BBC TV Newsnight on 24 January 1997) that prison officers brought in bolt cutters used to cut through a fence so as to enable four top security prisoners to escape. If they were brought in by visitors, then they would have had first to have been taken into the visitng room. "How a prisoner might then take receipt of them and secret them during a strip search is an alarming thought," muses Jeremy Hardy, comedian and campaigner for one of the escapees (Danny MacNamee, a fitted up prisoner). "They were two feet long."
Clearly screws can bring in what they like, even into the highest security jails. And they have strong motives for bringing in drugs - it makes their job easier, and they make a lot of money. Strict searching of visitors and prisoners can serve to maintain monopoly control of the drugs business. A weaker case has landed many prisoners inside with long sentences. But what are we alleging here? That the state spends money so as to enable its most lowly servants to profit and exercise power illegally and so beyond its control? Or is this a state conspiracy?
It seems like it. What we’re saying here may not often be said in public, but it’s not secret, and nor is it mere speculation. Everyone involved in the penal system right up to Michael Howard must know that drug tests are innacurate and ineffective in preventing drug use; that they push inmate cannabis users towards hard drug use; and that screws deal drugs. Everyone knows that illegal drugs are integral to the prison system and that control of prisoners depends on them. The switch to hard drugs due to the continuing enforcement of testing cannot be regarded as an unfortunate side effect unintended by state officials. Dealing by screws and by inmates who are not addicts but professional dealers in or outside prison, is not done in defiance of the state but in conformity with its policies - and so it continues, more firmly entrenched than ever.
The pattern is familiar. The privatisation of control, tried and tested in prisons in the years of the tobacco barons, has been extended and taken over by the state’s own officials acting in a private capacity, much as public resources like water have been privatised and handed over to other favoured individuals. In return, the officials deliver a service (in prisons, of control and of the production of a preferred type of prisoner) for which the state can deny all responsibility. What screws do, need not be directly controlled: the context in which they do it and the limits on what they can do ensure that their work, however illegal and unrecorded, gives the desired results. They take what rewards they can get - cash, sex, the indulgence of sadistic desires, a quiet life. No state conspiracy is needed to set up and run this drug economy, in which smack and coke are commodities with value beyond their use-value as narcotics What are the outputs of this economy, the circulation of drugs in prison?
The official policy of non-use as the only permissible choice for prisoners in conditions which promote and encourage use, leads via the switch to hard drugs, to needle sharing, the spread of AIDS, hepatitis and death. (The problem is exacerbated by a parallel refusal to recognise that prisoners may be sexually active and hence a refusal to make condoms available.) Government policies of prohibition and denial necessarily obscure the extent of the problem, but we know that the majority of those injecting drugs in prison share needles with others. 29% of inmates who injected in the Scottish prison Glenochil were found to be HIV positive (Peter J. Wayne, Inside Time, Winter 1996) . While drugs are relatively cheap in prison, prisoners don’t have much money, so they are tending to maximise the effect of heroin by injecting: needle use is increasing. This is obviously a matter of indifference to screws and prison managers alike (see last issue of Taking Liberties on deaths in prison). Killing is the ultimate control of individuals written off as undesirable, as the Nazis also decided (the comparison is more than rhetoric: the incarceration rate for blacks is ten times the rate for whites (statewatch November 1996), because racism is endemic in the criminal justice system and so the effects of prison are imposed disproportionately on ethnic minorities).
But control and killing are merely negative consequences of prison. Prison, as Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) observed, produces criminals and knowledge of them: it is a laboratory producing knowledge and a process producing effects in the society in which it is set. What are the products of the specific combination of prison and drugs - the return on the state’s investment?
The Prison industry
Richard Tilt, Director General of Prisons, tells us: "The whole community will benefit if we can break addicts from their habit while they are in prison, if only because they will be less likely to return to crime when they are released" (DI 5). And so it might, but the Director General neglects to mention that he runs the penal system so that it produces the very same problem with which he pretends to deal. Such clichés as this fall frequently from the lips of politicians and overpaid state officials, but just because they are banal and false does not mean that they are unconvincing. It’s based on the assumption that drug-related crime is a serious social problem that precedes prison, and that the acknowledged failure of prison is a failure to exclude this problem and a failure to change drug-using prisoners.
Tumin reported that " Manchester gangland culture was being replicated on the landings of Wymott prison…." Not for one moment did the famous prison inspector peer beyond his half-moon specs and see that " Manchester gangland culture" was being produced in, and by the prison. Since then prisons have increased the rate at which they bring together crime - usually minor, property-related crime - and drug addiction, and all the hierarchy of organised drug crime to which casual crime committed by the poor is thereby attached. Prison turns casual criminals into professional criminals (prisons have long acknowledged to be "universities of crime" as Kropotkin put it), and into junkies. In doing so, it is not reproducing outside society inside, but producing outside society from inside. So the problem of drugs in prison is not just a problem confined to prison, a problem of individual prisoners. Drugs in prison are not a prison problem - if they were, then the prison bosses have always had the means of excluding drugs and helping addicts to come off drugs. Drug abuse has always been a problem that is soluble within the closed system of the prison, at least. Drugs in prison are only a problem outside prison.
Prison thus forces the cliché that ‘drug use causes crime’ to come true, just as it takes that other ancient and long-discredited cliché about drug use, ‘soft drug use leads to hard drug use’ and forces it to come true as well - at least in prison, where control can be almost total. Fortunately the experiments pioneered in prison do not always have much effect in the outside world (although drug testing of workers is becoming more common, even amongst the police - driving them too to hard drugs?).
But the idea that drugs and crime are related, as well as their actual relationship, are currently major and successful products of the prison industry, by which it appropriates working class, casual, crime, committed by those in need, attaches it to a physical need and the organised satisfaction of that need, and turns it back on the working class itself - so that prison can present itself as the only available solution to the problem it creates.
Dealing with drugs
From our point of view, prison appears absolutely beyond control. It is not a matter of rejecting reform proposals in theory, of regarding reforms as pointless this side of the revolution. Reform is simply not an option on offer.
And while we may continue to expose the contradiction between what ministers and prison officials claim they are doing, and the practice that achieves the opposite, we will only be repeating what is blatantly obvious. The discourse which says that prisoners enter prison with problems (personal and social), and that the policy is for the reduction of those problems, is constantly reproduced, complete with supporting evidence, by a large and powerful institution which is beyond challenge. Its logic is not the logic of policy put into practice, but the logic of the practice of control and production, one of whose products is self-justifying discourse (the policy), one of whose tools is drugs.
Yet drug use in prison, its changing patterns and its external effects are not things we can ignore. The effects are everywhere - on our mates inside, in the drug-related crime that damages whole communities, in the irritating, vicious and anti-working class rubbish spouted by Howard, Straw and Blair. What can we do?
We must prevent the victims of the criminal justice system from becoming penal victims, help them to fight criminalisation and if we can’t do that, help them to get out; keep up our commitment to support class struggle prisoners, and help them to challenge drug tests. At present, the only help for prisoners is (typically, in our experience) provided by prisoners themselves. "Desperate inmate-addicts throughout the system have taken their own initiative and formed self-help therapy groups which have been meeting on a regular but totally unofficial basis during evening association periods," writes Peter J. Wayne, a long-term prisoner. "The odds are stacked against them" (Inside Time, Winter 1996).
* Drugs on the Inside, Penal Affairs Consortium (November 1996)
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