One of the first things they teach in public relations school in Ireland, I suspect, is that when working for a lobby group or representative body, every single news story should be linked back directly to your employer’s hobby horses.
So for example, if you work for a teacher’s union, any story about schools or education policy must be met with a complaint about pay and conditions. If you work for a group representing travellers, any comment you make on a story must mention decades of discrimination and isolation. And if you work for the prison officers, well:
PRISON OFFICERS HAVE said a mass overdose incident in Portlaoise Prison yesterday is a direct result of inaction from successive Ministers and governments.
Yesterday, 12 prisoners were rushed to hospitals after they had apparently overdosed on an opioid in Portlaoise prison, The Journal learned. It has been reported that all those impacted are currently stable and the situation is being monitored closely.
The group added that an immediate intervention needs to take place to curb the delivery of drugs into prisons and other systemic issues such as overcrowding, which it claims is stretching vital resources.
That overcrowding is an issue in Irish prisons is undoubtedly true – indeed here at Gript we have written about it on multiple occasions, including asking Ministers several times why no extra prisons have been built in Ireland for almost two decades even as the population has soared. That the prison officers have a valid hobby horse when it comes to over-crowding is indisputable.
Still, this is a separate and distinct question to the question of how, exactly, drugs are making it into the prisons that we do have.
Since bringing drugs into a prison is illegal, we must conclude that they are being smuggled into Irish prisons. Further, since these are prisons, we can be relatively certain that there are but a few mechanisms for bringing them in, at least some of which would be reliant on either the active collusion or incredible incompetence of prison guards. The innocent explanations include smuggling drugs in at visiting time, or via “gifts” to prisoners from the outside which have drugs hidden inside them in a sophisticated way. If that were the mechanism, then surely simply banning all packages from the outside would be a logical step to consider. These are prisons, at the end of the day, not holiday camps.
Another mechanism which potentially exonerates prison officers from complicity would be to throw the drugs over the wall, or have them dropped in via a drone. In both instances, one would think that this was a sub-optimal delivery method as the supplier could hardly be certain that the product would reach the specific prisoner who had ordered it. In any case, in both instances one would think that catching those responsible would be a matter of installing CCTV around the perimeters of the prison.
After that, I’m afraid, you’re left with the more disturbing possibilities, as a BBC report into this very problem in the United Kingdom found:
“The CSJ says when staff smuggle in drugs, it’s usually to make money but there have been cases of blackmail.
Twenty-five staff were convicted, dismissed or excluded in relation to bringing drugs into prisons in England last year.”
Given the sheer scale of the problem, if 25 prison officers were detected smuggling drugs into UK jails in a single year, we can probably reasonably surmise that many more than that number did the same thing and were not detected. We can also probably reasonably surmise that the UK and Ireland are sufficiently similar societies with sufficiently similar drug problems to suggest that if they have a problem with this kind of thing, we likely do as well.
Indeed, while these things don’t appear as often in the media here as they do in the UK, there was at least one arrest of an Irish prison officer this year when Gardai found drugs in his home. “It is understood”, the Irish Mirror reported, “that Gardai found tablets stitched into his prison uniform”.
While such cases of active involvement are undoubtedly the preserve of a corrupt minority across the prison service in general (as opposed to in any specific prison), there may well be another problem as well: When, a few years ago, this reporter spoke to an Irish prison officer about this very problem, it was suggested to me that in many cases prison management are relaxed about drugs entering prisons on the basis that were the supplies to stop or cease, managing the prisons would actually become much harder: It was the impression of the person I spoke to that life was much easier on certain prison wings if the inmates were happily doped up than it might be were the same people deprived of access to their drugs and became discontented as a result. While my interlocutor wasn’t suggesting any official policy was in place, he did intimate that in many cases, a blind eye might well be being happily turned by some of those responsible for preventing drugs getting into Irish jails.
This reminded me of the secondary school I attended in my youth, where everybody knew there was a particular hedge along the main walkway behind which illicit smoking was carried out during breaks – to the extent that you could often see the delicious fumes rising merrily from a hundred yards away – and yet teachers responsible for enforcing the rules against illicit smoking appeared entirely blind to it, presumably because well, who needs the hassle?
Ultimately though, even allowing that the Prison Officers are correct about overcrowding in Irish prisons, it is difficult to take them seriously when they connect that to the entirely separate question of how drugs are getting into Irish jails in the first place. That is about enforcement, not overcrowding.
Indeed, this strikes me as one of those things where the state could crack down hard on the problem if it really wanted to. The problem, it seems to this writer, is that it doesn’t really want to. Who, after all, needs the hassle?