Gardaí and prison staff in push to catch criminals controlling flow of drugs into jails

Gardaí and the Irish Prison Service have commenced a major new drive aimed at identifying and catching criminals who control much of the flow of drugs into Irish jails.

The move comes amid a surge in the number of drug and mobile phone seizures across the prison system.

Earlier this month, senior personnel from the prison service, including director general Caron McCaffrey, met high-ranking gardaí in a bid to plan the new operation. It will be focused on gathering intelligence, both inside and outside of prisons, to identity the key players profiting from the lucrative prison-based drug trade.

Garda operations around prison campuses are also being stepped up, aimed at catching those who throw contraband over the walls into prison yards or use drones for such deliveries.

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The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) has said interceptor drones were bought by the prison service and never used, while technology to block the signal between drones and their operators is still not in place.

[ Surge in level of drugs and phones smuggled into Irish jails, say prison officers ]

Karl Dalton, general secretary of the POA, which represents 3,300 prison officers across 12 jails in the Republic, said drug seizures in prisons had increased by 160 per cent since 2015. Mobile phone seizures had increased by just over 200 per cent. At the same time, the number of people arrested for smuggling these items into jails had fallen by half.

“During 2023 our members seized 1,272 mobile phones, 1,294 drug packs and 308 weapons, which were being smuggled into our prisons. As a follow-up to these seizures, 66 people were arrested,” Mr Dalton said at his association’s annual conference in Sligo.

Ms McCaffrey said the increase in seizures, resulted at least in part from the additional security measures, including in-cell searches and patrols of perimeter walls by prison staff. When gardaí recently ran an operation around Cloverhill Prison, Dublin, it resulted in 75 arrests. However, she also said the new drive between the Garda and prison service should accelerate that progress.

On April 10th, what she called “a high-level meeting” was held between her staff and a group of Garda assistant commissioners, chief superintendents and superintendents, including those from the specialist Garda units that fight organised crime. This group would now meet at least two times per year to ensure “we take every step we can to keep drugs out of prisons”.

[ Prison overcrowding raises risk of violence, warned Department of Justice in plea for more funding ]

“It is also around intelligence sharing, and around ensuring that we have as many operations as we can, and I think that’s a really positive development from our perspective,” she said.

While the prison service had also developed rehabilitative programmes for prisoners, more than 70 per cent of those in the prison population have addiction issues and would go to extraordinary lengths to smuggle drugs into jails. The supply of drugs into prisons is very competitive and lucrative, and she believed it warranted a major effort between the prison service and the Garda.

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