Prisoners get high on the warders’ supply

The British prison service is spending £70m a year treating drug addicts when, according to insiders interviewed for a BBC radio investigation, corrupt warders are responsible for the majority of the drugs traffic into jails.

At England's largest prison, Wandsworth, they have tried to put a figure on the amount of drugs being smuggled inside. "A crude estimate on the value of drugs in Wandsworth is about £1m a year," says David Jamieson, the chairman of Wandsworth's independent monitoring board. "What we're talking about is a large-scale business... there are some serious players involved in this."

As for the prison system as a whole, Huseyin Djemil, former head of drug treatment policy at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), estimates that the trade in heroin - the prisoners'

drug of choice - is worth £100m across the country's 140 jails.

He bases this figure on the 40,000 known drug users - half the prison population - using half a gram of drugs a week (as opposed to half a gram a day on the outside). "You're looking at 20kg a week to supply the national market," says Djemil. Annually that works out to over 1,000 kilos of heroin.

Now for the shocking news. That quantity of drugs cannot get into prison through wives and girlfriends visiting inmates. Prison staff are deeply involved. No one in the prison service likes to talk about it - it is the elephant in the room - but prison warders, whether turning a blind eye for monetary reward, or being actively involved, are, in effect, the jail system's biggest drug dealers.

Lord Ramsbotham, the former Chief Inspector of prisons, says