Commons Justice Committee warns of ‘endemic’ drug use in prisons and urges tighter mail controls
A secure national system for verifying legal correspondence sent into prisons must be developed urgently to stop the smuggling of drugs disguised as legal mail, MPs have said.
In its new report, Tackling the drugs crisis in our prisons, the Commons Justice Committee described the use and trade of illegal substances across the prison system as “endemic”.
The report stated that post is a “regularly used conveyance route” for new psychoactive substances (NPS), which can be “sprayed onto papers, such as fake legal correspondence.”
The HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) currently photocopies incoming mail to prevent drugs from being smuggled, but the committee found the measure “has not been consistently implemented across all prisons due to lack of funding and staff shortages.”
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The report highlighted HMP Wandsworth’s “Send Legal Mail” barcode policy, under which prison staff scan a barcode to verify the authenticity of legal correspondence, as one example of a more secure system.
The committee recommended that the prison service should:
“Rapidly develop and enforce a national, secure protocol for verifying legal correspondence (e.g. mandatory secure digital portals or standardised, verifiable bar-code systems) across all prisons to eliminate the exploitation of privileged mail.”
The report also stated that exposure of prison staff to drugs should be treated as a “serious workplace safety violation.”
It added:
“The MoJ and HMPPS have a duty of care to protect their employees, but the prevalence of drugs in prison is risking their ability to uphold it.
The high prevalence of drugs in prisons, particularly NPS, poses an unacceptable and direct threat to the safety and well-being of prison staff.”
The committee warned that staff had become “desensitised” to daily suffering, describing this as a sign of “a failed system and a dangerous culture of acceptance that must be broken.”
Among its wider recommendations, the committee called for an expansion of “purposeful activities”, such as education, vocational training, and accredited work programmes, as well as consistent medical-emergency training for all frontline staff.
Committee chair Andy Slaughter MP described the findings as “sobering.”
He said:“Put simply, the drugs crisis across the prison system has reached endemic levels, fostering a dangerous culture of acceptance that must be broken.
Without urgent reform and investment that tackles the profitable supply networks, the discrepancies in treatment provision and purposeful activity, plus the poor physical condition of the estate, prisons will remain unstable, unsafe and incapable of gaining control over the drugs crisis