GET TOUGHER ON DRUGS IN JAILS

RESEARCH results that point to the failure of prisons to rehabilitate drug
users have merely confirmed statistically what many people have had reason
to suspect for years.

That is that a drug culture is thriving in parts of the prison system. It
stands to reason that rehabilitation efforts - no matter how well funded -
are not going to work adequately if drugs of addiction or dependence are
available to prisoners.

Director of Prisons Terry Simpson has acknowledged that the rehabilitation
record is not good. He could hardly have done otherwise in the face of a
University of WA analysis that showed that nearly half the drug users in WA
prisons who reoffend go on to commit more serious crimes.

According to the analysis based on the people arrested for drug offences in
the 10 years to 1999, nearly 28 per cent of offenders went on to commit the
same offence, compared with 42.6 per cent who went on to more serious crimes.

About 70 per cent of drug users who committed crimes to feed their habits
were arrested again within five years of their last run-in with
police. People in this group were arrested 8.4 times on average.

Regardless of whether people think prisons should be places of punishment,
rehabilitation or some combination of both, they are entitled to expect
that drugs will be kept out. If offenders cannot be kept away from drugs
in prison, what hope is there of breaking their addiction or dependence and
hence their reliance on crime for raising drug money?

A period in prison should force a separation of offenders from the drugs
that fuelled their offences. The break from their habits in prison should
allow offenders to re-assess their lives and help them to build a resolve
to stay away from drugs.

But this does not happen when drugs are readily available to
prisoners. Thus the drug-crime cycle is perpetuated and prisons don't work
properly as deterrents or as agents off rehabilitation. The consequence is
that more innocent people become victims of increasingly hardened offenders.

West Australians are entitled to ask: why is it beyond the wit of the
relevant authorities to prevent the flow of drugs into prisons? Reasonable
people would accept that some drugs occasionally would be smuggled into
prisons, because resourceful and perhaps desperate people will find
ingenious ways of doing so.

But it has become evident over several years that drugs are routinely
available in WA prisons. A measure of that size of the problem is that
Attorney-General Jim McGinty has been moved to establish WA's first
drug-free wing at Wooroloo Prison for offenders who promise to quit drugs
while they serve their terms.

The inferences to be drawn from this are that prisoners elsewhere in the
system have access to the drugs they want if they do not want to quit, and
that the relevant authorities know this to be the case but cannot stop drug
trafficking in the prison system. The establishment of the drug-free wing
is a useful idea that might result in some offenders changing their ways,
but it also can be read as a tacit acknowledgment by the authorities that
the drug problem in the rest of the prison system is here to stay.

It has become evident that a more vigorous, all-out campaign is needed to
rid prisons of drugs.