By Jesse Bogan
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — Smugglers and contraband have been around as long as security, walls — and addicts.
In Missouri’s prison system, the cat-and-mouse game of illicit drugs pits 32,000 inmates of the Department of Corrections and thousands more on probation and parole, against the 11,000 employees of the Department of Corrections.
It’s a game that Missouri’s largest agency often loses, according to a Post-Dispatch assessment of the prison system’s own data.
Narcotics violations accounted for about a fifth of 5,065 reports of illegal activity within Missouri’s prison system from 2011 to mid-2014. All told, the corrections department’s office of Inspector General recorded 980 such incidents during that period, ranking it as the second most common violation — behind assault of an inmate by an inmate.
George Lombardi, the veteran leader of Missouri’s prison system, says that hardly a week goes by when a visitor doesn’t get caught attempting to bring drugs into the prison during visits.
“It still happens so frequently that you would think people would learn over a period of time that we are going to bust you, we are going to arrest you,” he told state lawmakers at a hearing. “But it still happens. It just amazes me.”
Experts say the prevalence of drugs in prison signals that drug treatment efforts inside and outside of prisons are ineffective, which undermines the integrity of the whole system. Nearly half of Missouri’s first-time drug offender population is back in prison within three years of release.
A random sampling of the Inspector General reports indicated that dope is hidden in all kinds of places. A bit of heroin wrapped in a piece of rubber glove, squirreled away in the end of a shoe. Marijuana tucked inside the bottom of a deodorant container. A rock of meth in a contact lens case.
Drugs get in, in various ways.
In May 2014, a mail room clerk at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia pulled a suspicious letter. It seemed to have excessive postage and a cavalier name on the return address — “Justin Tyme,” of Troy, Mo.
Two film strips of Suboxone were found behind the two postage stamps. Suboxone is used to help wean addicts from opiates but is also abused by people who haven’t developed a tolerance. According to an internal report, the letter was sent by the 22-year-old offender’s mother, a parole absconder with whom she used to do drugs on the streets. The inmate told investigators that Suboxone fetches about $70 for a half strip in the prison.
While some try the mail, there are other avenues inside.
The Inspector General reports include 39 cases involving narcotics violations by employees.
Cooper County Prosecutor Doug Abele said drugs packaged in balloons get delivered to job sites outside of the Boonville Correctional Center. Low-risk inmates with outside privileges hide the contraband in their bodies.
“Sometimes they are not the ones ordering or using the drugs,” Abele said. “They get persuaded by other inmates to do it and are afraid not to do it because they are threatened if they don’t. That certainly happens.”
Lombardi told legislators a few months ago that, as a deterrent, the department conducts shakedowns a couple of times a year at each facility to search for contraband. But it’s not enough. He said there were men who had “such control over some of the women in their lives on the outside that they will take the risk to bring it in.”
Men fall for it, too.
One of the reports described how a man from Warrenton got caught. The scheme was revealed through tips from inmates and review of surveillance video. He sneaked 30 Clonazepam pills into the Vandalia prison for his girlfriend, a heroin addict. The hand-off happened near a vending machine during a visit.
An investigator noted in the report that the woman pleaded with her boyfriend over the phone to bring the pills, typically used for panic disorders. The man “admitted that he knew that what he did was wrong, but he loves her so strongly he caved in to her request.”
In south-central Missouri, Texas County Prosecuting Attorney Parke Stevens said he had had three similar cases since he started his job in January. Visitors tried to smuggle drugs into the sprawling high-level security prison in rural Licking. In each case, he said, officials were first tipped off by monitoring code language in inmate telephone conversations or correspondence.
Stevens said he hadn’t started to tackle the backlog of cases involving inmates found with narcotics. With only one prosecutor in Texas County, there’s been a priority to focus on visitors trying to smuggle drugs.
“Unfortunately, these people are finding cracks and getting drugs inside,” he said.
Experts say that as long as there is demand, the drugs will get in. As in other states, Missouri has demand.
According to a 2014 survey of inmates in the Department of Corrections, nearly 90 percent of assessed prisoners had issues with substance abuse, with at least 22,302 of 31,889 total inmates needing treatment.
“It’s the dirty little secret about American prisons and jails,” said Martin Horn, a former warden in New York who teaches corrections policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A spokesman for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. Lombardi, who runs Missouri’s corrections system, declined to be interviewed.
His spokesman, David Owen, said in an email that there were so-called Institutional Treatment Centers around the state for substance abuse treatment of inmates, parolees and probation violators, with a variety of long-term to short-term programs. He said drug offenders were typically treated as they approached their release date.
Asked if the access to drugs compromised prison treatment programs, Owen responded that it could.
But he said the state was addressing the issue. Since 2009, 5 percent of offenders are randomly selected for drug testing and 5 percent of offenders who have previously tested positive are selected for “targeted testing.” If they test positive they are referred to an appropriate substance abuse program.
Owen said there was also random drug testing of employees throughout their employment.
He said that it was the department’s goal to reduce the number of inmates who return to prison but that more needed to be done in the community and that “offenders must be willing to change their substance abuse habits with the assistance of the department’s programs while incarcerated and after being released from prison.”
Horn, the professor at John Jay College, said he knew from experience that there were ways to reduce drug use in prisons.
In the 1990s, Horn led the Pennsylvania corrections system after the governor there raised concern about the number of inmates getting high. Horn started drug testing all inmates four times a year; 20 percent of guards were tested before each shift. If the guards tested positive, they were fired. The inmates were charged $25 for a positive drug test, and, if they didn’t say where they got the drugs, they’d lose privileges. “We went after what is most valuable — their visits,” Horn said.
After the first offense, the inmate lost three months of contact visits, then six months for a second offense. On the third, visits were cut for the duration of the prison sentence. “That got their attention,” he said.
Two years after the first test, Pennsylvania prisons were 99 percent drug free, according to a study of the effort. Drug finds dropped 41 percent, from 1,866 to 1,109; assaults on staff dropped 57 percent; inmate-on-inmate assaults fell 70 percent; weapons seized from searches fell to 76 from 220. “If you make the prisons safer and drug-free then you are going to obtain better outcomes,” he said.
St. Louis Circuit Court Judge James Sullivan said the Missouri recidivism rate — 45 percent of drug offenders’ winding up back in prison within three years — tells him that treatment needs are not being addressed in prison or in the community. “If the numbers are accurate, you are looking at a seriously addicted population within the wall of corrections,” said Sullivan, who helped fine-tune the drug court system in St. Louis.
He said addiction was like any progressive disease that can ruin people without treatment. “Where we need to go as a society is properly assessing needs of people who come before the court and respond appropriately and provide them the opportunity to get involved with programs that address their needs,” he said. “I don’t think they are exercising this behavior just because they are bored.”
Walker Moskop of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.