All mail received by Scottish prisons will be photocopied before being delivered to inmates under plans to keep drug-soaked letters out of jail.
Six prisoners at HMP Shotts were taken to hospital last week after suspected overdoses. Nine inmates have died at the jail this year.
Keith Brown, the justice secretary, announced yesterday that facsimilies of general correspondence would be handed to prisoners as part of “robust security measures” to control drug use among inmates.
Drug-laced letters have been implicated in a rash of suspected overdoses. Prison officers can confiscate the letters but have no power to destroy them and must hand them over to Police Scotland for investigation and disposal.
It has emerged that police rarely collect the letters, leaving prison staff no option but to give them to their recipient on release.
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Nicola Sturgeon has promised “due and serious consideration” will be given to whether prisons should have to store drug-soaked mail for inmates before returning it when they leave jail, although she insisted that prisoners’ rights had to be respected
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, said that current procedures allowed prisoners “to have items contaminated with drugs safely stored and returned to them on their release”.
During first minister’s questions, Ross said that Brown had “refused to give a serious response to this issue” and called on the first minister to “commit to ending this practice immediately”.
Sturgeon told him: “In the spirit of openness I will certainly look at that,” but she stressed prisoners’ rights had to be considered carefully.
She said: “If we consider there is a change that is necessary and appropriate and possible to make there, I undertake I will give that due and serious consideration.”
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Ross said his party has been highlighting “for months” the issue of “drugs reaching prisoners through mail”.
Russell Findlay, Conservative MSP for West Scotland, first raised the issue of photocopying prisoner letters at Holyrood’s criminal justice committee in early September.
On the change to inmates being given photocopied mail, Sturgeon said: “It is the case that the prison service have taken time to consider, and rightly taken time to consider, the range of very serious operational and legal considerations.
“That includes taking into account prisoners’ rights, which are often determined through court judgments, around the handling of their correspondence. That is a fundamental consideration. So they have taken that time. And after detailed operational consideration the prison service now will be implementing this change.”
This week, the Prison Officers Association called for urgent actionto tackle the issue of drugs in prison.
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John Cairney, chairman of the union’s Scottish national committee, told members that staff were seeing “unbelievable disruption” and working in increasingly unsafe conditions.
Drug seizures in prisons more than doubled last year despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Staff intercepted 5,480 parcels and many had identified synthetic psychoactive drugs and etizolam, known as street valium, to be the growing problem.
Ross also highlighted Scottish Prison Service documents that showed there had been over 2,200 incidents of prisoners misusing government-bought phones, which he said were used to deal drugs in prisons. The phones must be removed immediately, Ross said.