Mountjoy denies drug security claims
Everyone entering Irish prisons — staff, visitors and prisoners — are supposed to go through airport-style security to keep drugs out.
The measures include walk-through X-ray scanners, drug detection dogs and, in some cases, special seats that check body orifices for concealed drugs.
The CPT report said these measures were in evidence to “varying degrees” in prisons but that the effectiveness of their application should be carefully monitored.
It added: “For example, security checks on staff should be as rigorous as they are for visitors, which was not the case at Mountjoy Prison.”
A spokesman for the Prison Service last night told the Irish Examiner that the new Governor of Mountjoy had confirmed the following:
* All visitors to the prison, including all staff, must pass through the airport style security procedures at the entrance to the prison including a walk-through metal detector and X-ray machine for all personal items.
* All staff strictly comply with the security protocols and remove watches, waist belts, and such other items as requested by the search staff.
* Random pat down searches take place for all staff and service providers entering and leaving.
The spokesman said CCTV cameras were in operation at the search facility and that a shoe monitoring machine had recently been introduced.
Elsewhere, the CPT report said it had “serious concerns” at the manner in which methadone, the legal substitute for heroin, was prescribed in Cork, Midlands and Mountjoy prisons.
It said methadone should only be prescribed as part of a comprehensive treatment programme, involving access to addiction counsellors.
It said prisoners at Midlands and Mountjoy were often not required to engage with addiction counsellors and that methadone was simply “free petrol” in many cases.
It said in one case in Mountjoy a prisoner on methadone was tested 21 times for other drugs and each time tested positive for benzodiazepines (tranquillisers) and 10 times for heroin but no action was taken to review his methadone.
Inspectors said they came across a number of cases at Cork Prison of prisoners undergoing heroin withdrawal and who were not receiving “any support” and were “clearly suffering”.
It added: “In several cases, the prisoners in question were sharing a cell with one or two other persons which, given the symptoms of withdrawal (including vomiting and diarrhoea) and the lack of in-cell sanitation, made the process all the more unpleasant.”
