PUNTING POT

Inmates Use Footballs And Baseballs To Smuggle In Drugs

Guards at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre foiled a bizarre
attempt to smuggle drugs in a football.

On Saturday night, a prisoner doing cleanup duty triggered an alarm
when he got too close to a fence line at the jail, sending guards
scurrying to the scene, where they grabbed the inmate and discovered
a football filled with tobacco, said Solicitor General spokesman
Christine Skjerven.

"This is the only time we know of that this has happened," she said.

The inmate faces internal charges and a disciplinary hearing.

Correctional officers, who regularly sweep the prison inside and out,
found another football inside the fence line containing tobacco and
two more outside containing drugs, Skjerven said.

But inmates insist they've been receiving contraband from footballs
tossed into the jail's open field for more than six months.

"This has been going on for a while," said one prisoner. "It's been
going on since I've been here and I've been here since November."

Using the technique, inmates say they have smuggled crack, marijuana,
ecstasy, hash oil, tobacco and lighters into the facility.

Once inside, inmates sell the drugs: $15 for a gram of tobacco, $50
for a gram of weed, $80 for half a gram of crack and $150 if a
lighter and pipe are included.

Inmates say they just wait for guards who don't pay close attention
to them and then sneak out to snatch the footballs.

Football or baseball tossing as a way to smuggle drugs inside the
institution isn't novel.

But correctional officers also aren't lazy and don't turn a blind eye
to inmates smuggling drugs, said the president of the union that
represents them.

"I doubt that," said Doug Knight, president of the Alberta Union of
Provincial Employees. "Consider the source."

Skjerven said correctional officers are "vigilant" and "diligent"
when they do their searches.

"We do a security check of the wall every shift," she
said.

The field in which the footballs would have landed, happens to be
huge and anything landing in it would be easily seen, Skjerven added.

"It's pretty hard to miss them," she said.

Besides, the perimeter of the fence is sensored and activates an
alarm any time it's stimulated, she added.

In March, the Solicitor General's department added a sniffer dog,
Chaz and his handler, Shaun McCoy, to comb eight provincial jails for
marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, crystal meth and prescription pills.

Plans are to do 100 random searches annually.

The province has been using provincial jails, including Fort
Saskatchewan, to alleviate overcrowding at the Edmonton Remand Centre.

The province is building a new remand centre.

The new 16-hectare facility is intended to house 2,000 inmates
awaiting trial.

It will replace the current, badly overcrowded, 27-year-old downtown
lockup.

Construction is set to start this fall, and should take three to five
years.