Almost 5,000 drug seizures in jails in past three years

THERE WERE nearly 5,000 drug seizures in the State’s prisons in the past three years, with Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, accounting for almost half of them.

A system of searching for drugs in prisons, introduced by the last government, appears to be showing results.

The system involves airport-style searches of everyone who enters and leaves prisons and uses sniffer dogs to detect drugs. It was introduced in the summer of 2008.

According to figures released by the Department of Justice, there were 4,725 drug seizures across the prison system from the start of 2009 up to February 26th last, a period of three years and two months.

The drug types and quantity involved are not outlined. However, a breakdown of the number of seizures in each jail was provided by the department.

The highest number of drug finds in any prison during the period occurred in Mountjoy in 2010 when drugs were discovered on 683 occasions.

From May 2008 until the end of that year there were 351 recorded drug seizures, or an annualised rate of about 650 cases for that year.

In 2009, the first full year of the new searching system, the number of seizures significantly increased to 1,293 and increased further in 2010, to 1,793 cases.

But total seizures decreased last year by almost 20 per cent to 1,417 as the new regime appeared to have bedded in and had begun to reduce the supply of drugs.

While Mountjoy had by far the most drug finds since the start of 2009 – at 1,661 cases – Limerick Prison is the next on the list with 536 seizures.

This is followed by St Patrick’s Institution for young offenders, which is in the Mountjoy campus, where drugs have been seized 525 times.

Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin’s north inner city, where a large number of sex offenders are housed, is almost drug free, with just two drug discoveries having been made there since the start of 2009.

There were only 74 drug finds at the Dóchas Centre for women in the Mountjoy complex and there were 86 seizures in Portlaoise Prison, where dissident republicans and a small number of gangland prisoners are housed separately under maximum security conditions.

The figures were released to Sinn Féin’s justice spokesman Jonathan O’Brien TD in response to a Dáil question.

He was concerned that the number of seizures had risen in 2011 in some prisons.

He believed this was proof that the decision by the last government to prioritise a high-security regime in jails at the expense of offering rehabilitative programmes to drug-addicted prisoners was not working.

“Clearly this has failed as there is still substantial demand for drugs in Irish prisons and the current Government has simply picked up where the previous [one] left off,” he said.

Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said people sometimes went to ingenious lengths to smuggle drugs into jails.

While a lot of contraband material was thrown over perimeter walls and passed to people during visits, some people had sewn drugs into clothing left at jails for prisoners.

Other attempted tricks included cases where newspapers had been left with prison staff, for prisoners, with drugs concealed in them.