This misses the elephant in the room: How can they "find" anything in prison?
The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-pris...
The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-pris...
There were over 800 of us and around 10 staff on actual security detail at a time. There were maybe 40 searches a week and they were normally targeted on the people that they had suspicions about. It happened to me one time and they guy found my camel crush. Thankfully I had been there less than 3 weeks so he just assumed someone stashed it there since I moved into an empty bunk. After that I never had another issue.
Spice is horrible. We'd have people vomiting regularly. They'd get "stuck" outside when we got called back into the units. It's really gnarly stuff that I would not willingly ingest. The most popular drug was definitely suboxone. The drug tests were not working for subs when I was still there. Supposedly they were just starting to come out with some for it that the BOP used.
Every thing went in a cycle. One guy would run most of the smuggling for the white people. I'm not going to name names here, but his balance sheet showed about $75k in profit over a rolling 6 month period. Another ran it for most of the African Americans. Eventually runners would get caught or the ring leader would get busted with a cell phone. That gives you an immediate upgrade to the next highest level facility. Prices would jump until someone was crazy enough to start it all back up again.
Right before I left the biggest person got caught with a sim card. Prices for cigarettes went up to nearly $15 each. That was if you were remotely lucky enough to find one. A guy came back on probation violation and luckily enough I was his bunk mate. Things went back to regular within a couple of weeks. He made more in Morgantown than he did on the street...
Subs/meth/vape juices could be applied to paper inside of books or letters. Anything liquid and dried usually could come in that way, but in a minimum it's not even worth the hassle.
At higher levels things start to go more and more by the car system. You only associate with your race and your number. You get an ID number, which in my case is #####-083. The last three digits represent where you are from. 083 is Hampton Roads in Virginia. You ONLY hang out with your race and your area. It can go above just the city into more regional things. You only go outside of your car for business.
I also found out about "making spread" and was amazed at the ingenuity of some folks and what they could do with ramen, water, some crumbled up cheetos and a pound cake. And how this was used in the internal economy. Fascinating stuff.
On the negative side, most of the people were in there for petty drug offenses, e.g. victimless crimes not involving violence which upset me greatly. Such a shame since most of these guys were obviously above-average IQ and otherwise nice, sometimes charismatic people. What a waste of tax dollars and lives.
So many stories just from my short stay there.
There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly. Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.
There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.
There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having anywhere near their actual sentence length.
In one federal medium I was at, the guys from maintenance had broken through the wall behind a urinal and installed a still in the wall. They used a hot plate from a coffee maker. They covered it up by replacing the tiles and "caulking" between them with the institution issued tooth paste. I used those urinals for months without ever knowing about it.
It was dismantled after the unit orderly snitched about it. That guy was murdered the next week. It turned out he had also snitched on some co-defendants for a reduced sentence.
I heard the hooch from that still was stronger than whiskey and pretty nasty tasting.
Most guys just tried to make alcohol with some bread and oranges in a trash bag stuffed in a locker or under a bunk.
In fact, this issue is becoming more and more of a challenge today as drone technology advances and decreases in price[0].
0: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/15/564272346/prisons-work-to-kee...
As for drones, let me try to fly a drone over GCHQ or the Pentagon and let's see what happens... But over a prison and then actually drop something? "Oh well, what can we do? Can't even find what they drop..."
The point in all of this is that no-one cares too much so it happens, but it is avoidable.
I was expecting a bit more of a can-do attitude on HN instead of accepting this sorry state of affairs!
...or effective procedures would toss human rights into the bin. Client-Attorney communication secrecy and visitation rights are one point, body cavity searches and visitation rights for close relatives of inmates another.
Prison guard - standing all day with rifle, anyone can do that. Nurse - giving pills and injections, what is so hard about it? Software dev - sitting behind computer all day lazy slob, he could get some real job :)
If you give people enough time of course they will do that what you couldn't imagine possible in 20 seconds.
> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.
But what you're describing here seems just as likely to be a resourcing and procedure issue.
For example, do you think it's fair that all visitors must undergo a full cavity search before being allowed to see an inmate? Even attorneys? If not, then should the inmate go through that procedure after every visit? Will we all be happy with the increased costs to hire additional staff?
The creativity of prisoners is much higher than you expect. To 100% eliminate smuggling into prisons, you'd need to operate every facility as if its SuperMax.
Once they busted the main supplier at Morgantown people got desperate and started trying the visitor's room. One poor guy in a wheelchair got busted with 2 cell phones, 4 packs of cigarettes, and pills coming out of visitation. Absolutely stupid. You could definitely get in suboxone or a couple of cigarettes. Anything bigger than that it wasn't going to work. When you go back in they pat you down, but randomly you can get a significantly more thorough search.
The only place where the guards are an issue are mediums. A $6 pack of cigarettes becomes $20 at a minimum, $50 at a low, and $100+ at a medium. At low and above you'll often find they're selling little matchstick sized cigarettes that are rolled up from the person responsible for cleaning up after guards. It's usually "used" chewing tobacco.
At the medium level you don't get to talk to visitors face to face normally. That makes even visitation smuggling impossible. It can only filter in from guards or from the satellite minimum security camp.
There are a lot of ways you can get drugs in to prison without the aid of guards.
- Repeat offenders used to getting arrested (particularly drug dealers) would carry their drugs in what is termed a cock sock, which is as you may guess, a sock worn around the male bits to hold things. They would tie pre-weighed bags of drugs up in balloons, and if it smelled they were going to get arrested they would make an attempt to dig them out and swallow them, and then erm, retreive them later in the jail.
- A more creative way was for spouses/relatives to soak certain types of paper in a liquid solution in which had been dissolved drugs like meth, and then allowed to dry. The paper was then written on like a regular letter, and sprayed with perfume (which is a very normal thing in jail/prison) to mask any trace scent of the drug and the fact that it looked like it had been wet and dried.
- Inmates that were in the lower-security units such as day workers, in which they were taken out during the day to perform community service under supervision, would devise elaborate plans to smuggle things in. There were certain work areas that had things like public restrooms, and they would phone a girlfriend/wife the day before to go drop a bag of drugs in the ceiling of the bathroom and then retrieve it while working there the next day. They would place it you know where to avoid having it found when they were strip-searched when taken back to the unit. This was rare though, and more common was that they would pick up cigarette butts as they worked, empty out any remaining tobacco, and then stash it you know where in some sort of balloon/saran wrap to bring back to the unit to smoke. This was done by popping a socket, which is where you use pencil lead stuck inside of an outlet to spark a piece of paper (typically from a book or newspaper) rolled with aforementioned garbage-tobacco.
IF I HAVE ANYONE'S ATTENTION:
The American criminal justice system is one of the most dehumanizing, corrupt, and inhumane places I have ever seen.
I saw inmates have bones broken by guards for saying things they didn't like. They are not allowed to throw punches or kicks during restraints, so what they do is put 3-4 guards on a man and will repeatedly knee/elbow them, particularly in the head, whilst screaming STOP RESISTING, despite there being zero resistance.
It was a common tactic for them to strip a person to their underwear, and put them in a restraint-chair [0] with a hood over their face so that they cant see or move any limb, and then wheel them off to a back room and accidentally forget about them for 4-8 hours.
I don't have anything else to say besides the fact that I want to raise awareness for any of you who may not know what our justice system is like.
Unfortunately that trespassing was the lowest-class felony so it has made it one hell of a time for me getting a job later in life, with HR policy in most places and the fact it never leaves your record.
I was very fortunate when I first got home. I went to a fairly good, borderline great, engineering school. I was lucky enough to be picked up back in my same field. Once I can get my security clearance back or even just naval base access it'll be better.
So this. There's an entire stack of industries that thrive on this inhumanity, too e.g. Corrections Corporation of America, all the medical, legal and culinary/janitorial staff, lawyers and their retainers...
Then again, I've heard jails in other countries are considerably worse, with dirt floors and 20 people in a cell, like Brazil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the criminal justice system here in the US and decrease the abuse of basic human rights in its correctional facilities, though.
The state of prisons is avoidable and due to society not caring enough. Is that a false and ignorant claim? Why? I think you should explain because I think that may claim is patently observable and a matter of fact.
> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.
> Smuggling is impossible unless staff turn a blind eye, or procedures are sufficiently lax
Here's an example: these two statements are false.
Trying to present opinions as facts makes you non-credible, you should avoid doing it.
There's no avoiding that...
Of course it's avoidable. But no-one cares enough: As long as it is hard enough to escape then the public does not care too much whether inmates use drugs, rape/fight each other, or what not, especially if stopping that would mean spending more on prisons.
The fallacy (or hypocrisy) is to pass off lack of will as practical impossibility.
The UK and the US are among the richest countries on Earth and they are democracies. There is no escaping that the state of their prisons represents the collective decision of society (us all).
a better option, and one more befiting of these rich democracies is to just let them have some of those affects and get on with it. controlling every inch of their lives is the opposite of the democratic ideal
Clearly there does not seem to be much political will to do so. It's easier to pretend and, after all, the victims are only inmates.
At least in the US, most people are not fond of the idea of spending more money with the prison system.
1. Them being alive. Obvious fix but not useful or moral. 1a. The less omnicidal but potentially more niche in practice answer is "get humans out of the loop" - that worked quite successfully with automated phone switchboards. 2. Their incentives being misaligned with the nominal goal. The easiest fix there is a "sarcastic AI" goal of making the corruption the explicit legal goal aligning them. 3. Lack of effective oversight - they can only be corrupt if they can get away with it without sufficient negative consequences. Certainty and speed is more important than magnitude and not being enough to be worth doing anyway in spite of punishment. 3a. Enforcement in practice suffers from "turtles all the way down" with who watches the watchers. Transparency and multilateralism can help but well international law is only a series of guidelines because of it being multilateral between powers.