I have been around long enough to remember when the only serious drug problem in prison was tobacco.
It was everywhere. Tobacco was currency, status and survival rolled into one. It fuelled debt, extortion and violence and, given enough time, there was a fair chance it would kill you. The smell of stale smoke hung permanently in the air, mixed with sweat and urine in the era when prisoners still “slopped out” every morning, carrying buckets along Victorian landings that should probably have been condemned decades earlier.
These were hardly the halcyon days of penal reform. But prison populations were far lower. In the early 1970s the population in England and Wales hovered around 40,000; today it stands at over 88,000 and is projected to rise further. Life sentence prisoners numbered fewer than 2,000. A 15-year sentence was considered exceptional rather than routine. Serious organised crime existed – the Krays and their contemporaries ensured that – and corruption was never absent. After all, corruption has always been one of the few genuinely resilient institutions in the prison system.
But today’s prisons are fundamentally different.
Prisons increasingly difficult to govern
Longer sentences, overcrowding and chronic staff shortages have created institutions that are increasingly difficult to govern. Terrorist prisoners now sit alongside serious organised crime groups, each capable of intimidation, radicalisation and recruitment. Technology has transformed the landscape further. Mobile phones, encrypted communications and drone deliveries have magnified every weakness prisons already possessed.
We still talk endlessly about “rehabilitation”, though one might reasonably ask whether it is possible to rehabilitate people who were never meaningfully habilitated into society in the first place. Can you reform someone who, in terms of education, employment, family stability or social attachment, was never properly formed by mainstream society at all?
There was once an old prison service cliché that prisoners – meaning mainly men – eventually “grew out of it”. Armed robbers from the 1960s either ended up shot by the Flying Squad or concluded that running a pub and settling into married life was less stressful than carrying a sawn-off shotgun. Prison may not have been producing measurable social good, but equally it was not systematically manufacturing people who were more chaotic, more damaged and more permanently excluded than when they entered.
That is where we are now.
And nowhere is this failure more visible than in the modern prison drug economy.
The scourge of performance culture
Tobacco is gone – officially at least – banned across prisons in England and Wales in 2017 on health grounds. If you did not laugh, you would cry.
Drug testing began in the 1990s with broadly sensible intentions. It allowed prisoners to demonstrate progress and enabled treatment staff to monitor misuse. Initially, it was a tool.
Then, inevitably, it became a KPI.
The managerial state descended with its spreadsheets and clipboards. Mandatory Drug Testing (MDT), Voluntary Drug Testing (VDT) and various other acronyms multiplied. Performance culture took hold. Governors were judged increasingly through league tables and centrally imposed metrics.
When I took over at HM Prison Brixton in 2003, the newly introduced prison league tables promptly placed us near the bottom nationally. Curiously, however, one area showed extraordinary “success”: positive MDT rates stood at around 2 per cent.
An astonishing achievement – unless, of course, you actually walked the landings.
Even a moderately competent governor could tell something was wrong. So, perhaps foolishly, I examined the testing process and ensured it was implemented properly rather than cosmetically.
The positive rate immediately rose to around 50 per cent.
I still regret not framing the letter from headquarters demanding to know why I had apparently decided to “allow drugs to flood the prison”.
The unintended consequences of MDT were profound. Prisoners quickly realised heroin left the body far faster than cannabis, making it harder to detect through testing. Cannabis lingered for weeks; heroin did not. Unsurprisingly, some prisoners switched accordingly.
Public policy has a habit of colliding with inconvenient reality.
Today the situation is immeasurably worse.
Spice replaces tobacco
In many prisons it is easier to obtain drugs than basic necessities such as toilet paper. Nor are these traditional narcotics. Synthetic cannabinoids – commonly known as Spice – dominate many jails. These substances are cheap, potent and chemically unpredictable. Users often have little idea what they are consuming. The effects range from psychosis and collapse to death. Reports from across the prison estate describe prisoners unconscious, hallucinating or suffering seizures on wings that staff no longer fully control.
According to the Ministry of Justice, there were over 19,000 drug finds in prisons in England and Wales in the year to March 2024 – the highest figure on record. Meanwhile, HM Inspectorate of Prisons repeatedly reports that drugs are “widely available” in many establishments.
What receives less attention is who pays for all this.
Back in the tobacco era, prisoners could not afford to smoke heavily. Cigarettes were expensive relative to prison wages, which meant consumption, though widespread, remained constrained by economics.
Today, very few prisoners earn enough through prison work to sustain the prices demanded by illicit drug markets inside. Prison drugs routinely cost several times street value. Payment therefore comes through other means: violence, coercion, trafficking, corruption, sexual exploitation – and increasingly through families on the outside.
Families already coping with imprisonment are drawn into debt and intimidation. Men enter prison drug-free and emerge addicted, owing thousands of pounds to organised criminal networks operating both inside and outside the walls.
My own estimate is that the prison drug economy in England and Wales is now worth somewhere in the region of £1 billion annually. I challenge anyone in government or the prison service to produce a serious alternative calculation. Given the scale of use, the inflated internal prices and the industrial quantities entering establishments every week, it is difficult to conclude otherwise.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer measure of systemic failure.
The official response focuses heavily on security: drones, enhanced gate controls, body scanners, searching strategies, anti-corruption units and intelligence operations against organised crime groups. All are necessary.
But they are not sufficient.
A collapse of purpose
Far less attention is paid to the conditions that make drug use attractive in the first place: boredom, isolation, inactivity and hopelessness. Too many prisoners spend most of the day locked behind doors with little purposeful activity, limited education and minimal opportunities for meaningful work or training. Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of prisons, has repeatedly warned that purposeful activity and time out of cell remain dangerously inadequate across much of the estate.
Yet the political response remains stubbornly predictable: build more prisons.
Ministers insist they are not trying to “build their way out of the crisis” while simultaneously attempting to build their way out of the crisis. The latest example is HMP Millsike, reportedly costing around £450 million – roughly £200 million more than earlier prisons of comparable size.
The uncomfortable truth is that prisons increasingly contain large numbers of people who leave more addicted, more indebted, more traumatised and less employable than when they entered. That is not simply a security failure. It is a collapse of purpose.
We built prisons to deprive people of liberty. We are now running institutions that routinely deprive people of stability, sanity, family and any realistic prospect of lawful survival afterwards. A civilised society should be alarmed not simply by the drugs entering prisons, but by the fact that the state appears to have surrendered entire parts of the prison system to the economy, violence and values of organised crime.
And that may ultimately be the defining scandal of modern imprisonment: not that prisons fail to rehabilitate, but that in too many cases they actively institutionalise despair.
