PRISON BATTLES DRUG-SMUGGLING SCOURGE

Auckland's Paremoremo Prison is continuing to fight against a drugs
problem as prisoners try the most desperate and inventive ways of
getting drugs inside.

Corrections national systems and security manager Karen Urwin says
people are going to ingenious lengths to get drugs into prisons, even
resorting to putting them inside dead birds and throwing the bodies
over prison walls.

"Aside from the dead bird approach, we have had incidents of visitors
concealing drugs in a variety of ways including hiding them in the
frame of a pushchair," she says.

Acting prison manager Peter Phelan says methamphetamine or P is the
drug of choice for some prisoners and it has become a big problem at
Paremoremo.

Auckland Prison is New Zealand's only maximum security prison and it
also has a medium security wing plus three other units for
minimum-security prisoners and sex offenders.

An average of 645 prisoners are housed there.

Mr Phelan says the minute traces of methamphetamine can make it easy
to conceal and harder to detect.

He says the prison has a zero tolerance for drugs but prisoners
smuggling in contraband is an age old problem.

"The old tennis ball trick is still a problem today," he says.

Most commonly prisoners and their accomplices try to smuggle in drugs
through the mail or in electrical appliances, he says.

And legislation prevents them from doing body cavity searches, he says.

Mr Phelan says they use prison intelligence to discover drug and
alcohol trends and then focus on those areas to try and eliminate them.

Ms Urwin says prisoner drug use trends tends to follow those of
society at large.

She says cannabis is still the most frequently detected drug in
prisons but P and amphetamine-type drugs have been more increasingly
detected in recent years.

Ms Urwin says no prison in the world is completely free of drugs, but
there is evidence detection measures are working because the numbers
of prisoners testing positive for drugs in random tests is decreasing.

She says corrections has stepped up surveillance at checkpoints and
entrances to prisons and has doubled the number of drug dog teams and
introduced new scanning equipment.

"While it would be naive to suggest we can stamp out drugs all
together, this is a war we believe we are winning," she says.