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| Louisiana better at conrolling contraband |
| By Greg Garland |
| Published: 04/28/2009 |
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ANGOLA, La. — The walls of Lt. Joseph Russell’s security office at Louisiana State Penitentiary are covered with dozens of snapshots of illegal drugs, homemade knives and other prohibited items corrections officers have found on inmates, visitors and staff at the sprawling prison. The photos starkly illustrate a problem that prisons across the nation face— keeping contraband out and finding prohibited items that inmates try to hide from the correctional staff. Prison experts say it is impossible to keep out all contraband, despite the best efforts of prison administrators and security staff. Louisiana, which implemented extensive court-ordered prison reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, does a better job than most, said Jim Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association. “Angola is a picture-perfect example of how their system has turned around,” Gondles said. Angola had a fearsome reputation as the bloodiest prison in America before the federal courts intervened to force changes in how that prison and others were managed. Gondles noted that Louisiana is one of only 14 states whose prisons are fully accredited by the corrections association. The state has just under 20,000 inmates in 11 state-run and two privately managed prisons. To achieve accreditation, prisons must show they adhere to national standards set by corrections experts, he said. But even well-run prisons confront problems with contraband. “It’s like fishing, you can’t catch them all,” Angola Warden Burl Cain said. According to statistics compiled by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, illegal drugs were found inside state prisons on 1,265 occasions from 2006 to 2008. During the same three-year period, urinalysis tests conducted on inmates registered positive for drugs 1,402 times. The prison system conducts more than 40,000 such tests each year, records show. He said that helped attract better job candidates, less prone to being corrupted. It also improved retention rates. “What hurt us was when the pay was so low that we’d hire anybody who could walk and chew gum at the same time,” Cain said. “Most of this is gone now.” Travis, chief of operations, said inmates will seek to turn a corrections officer by paying him to bring in small creature comforts — such as a pack of gum that isn’t available from the prison commissary or a McDonald’s hamburger. If an officer falls into that trap, he can be blackmailed later into bringing in drugs or other contraband, Travis said. Rader said the small amount of drugs and contraband that gets into Louisiana’s prisons appears to come in mostly through inmates on outside work details. “I think less comes in through visitation and more comes in through offenders or employees smuggling it in,” Rader said. Most are random, but others are conducted based on “reasonable suspicion” — which means an inmate’s behavior suggests he might be using drugs. The majority that turned up positive — 1,167 — registered for THC, the chemical substance found in marijuana. But there also were 71 positives for cocaine, 30 for amphetamines and 119 for other drugs, according to data compiled by prison officials. Jeff Travis, chief of operations for the corrections department, said drugs find their way into Louisiana’s prisons a variety of ways. For example, he said, an accomplice from the outside might tape a packet of drugs to the back of a street sign for an inmate on a work crew to retrieve, or leave drugs in an empty soda can along the highway. “When you’ve got a bunch of inmates trying to beat you,a little bit gets by you sometimes,” Travis said. And the inmates can be inventive. In one case, an inmate had a friend tape some marijuana to a paper airplane and sail it across a double security fence and onto prison grounds, said Steve Rader, warden of Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson. Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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