If prisons are supposed to be among the most secure places in our society — if they are where we send the worst of the worst — then isn’t it safe to assume they would be highly secure and safe from the troubles of the street?
Well, yes — and no.
Overall, prisons are pretty darned efficient in keeping the convicted in. Where they lose the battle is over keeping out what doesn’t belong.
When wardens deal with inmate placement, they usually decide to keep specific gang members together. To assign a member of the Crips to a cellblock full of members of the Bloods would be to invite someone’s murder.
The problem with this is, of course, it’s a great way for gangs to continue their activities while incarcerated.
And, every prison official I’ve spoken with, from Maryland to California and New York to New Mexico, agrees its those gang members who conspire to make sure there is a steady stream of illegal drugs coming to their neighborhood … even if the stash has to get by prison security. In other words, gang members who go to prison get to keep their friends and feed their drug habits.
“Inmates have 24-7, 365 days a year, over all the years they’re in here, to think of ways to circumvent prison security measures,” says retired warden Ralph Logan of the Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover, Md.
Logan worked his way up through the ranks at the prison, serving the system for 29 years. He shakes his head in disbelief over the ever-evolving ways convicts conspired to get their drugs.
His guards at ECI discovered everything from marijuana to heroin hidden inside baby diapers, girlfriend’s body cavities, and in magazines and books visitors tried to bring in as gifts.
Rob Perry, the former secretary of corrections for New Mexico from 1997 to 2002, says powdered drugs are often sent through the U.S. mail, packed tightly into the corners of envelopes or sent via greeting cards soaked in liquefied methamphetamine or cocaine. The prisoner simply melts the impregnated section of the card in their mouth to get their high.
An evidence supervisor from Santa Barbara, Calif., told me guards confiscated a “crispy pair of gift socks” from a visitor to their prison, and after testing they were found to be loaded with dried meth. I guess the idea was to wet down the socks and strain out the booty.
Outside-the-walls coordination is not unusual, according to Perry. His most outrageous smuggling story had to have required much preparation and some sophisticated machine tools, as well.
“I saw a quarter,” he told me about an item confiscated by one of his department’s guards. “Someone had cut the thickness of the quarter in half and hollowed it out, leaving a circular chamber inside. A tiny pin connected the two halves. There was black tar heroin inside.”
It was obviously painstaking work, and it was duplicated, according to Perry, on half a dozen quarters. The visitor who passed them was never located.
Dan Hanks is a reformed ex-con who still remembers how he and his California prison gang got around the rules. “Prisons operate,” he says, “because the inmates do the work.”
“If you’ve got any kind of skill at all, they assign you to a job that needs that skill [because] that saves them from having to hire a free man to do the job.”
Prisoners run the laundry, and order in goods for the kitchen, the library and the wood shop, where they make furniture for state offices. There is a shipping and receiving department, and it’s often run by inmates. Think of the opportunities they have to coordinate incoming drug shipments with gang members on the outside. It’s estimated that it costs an average $34,000 a year to house a prisoner. Unless we’re prepared to spend about double that, the situation is not going to change.
Examiner Columnist Diane Dimond is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
