Drug abuse in U.S. prisons is tough to stamp out

Richard Pillajo, a wellness education officer at a Florida state prison, strayed beyond his job description, according to investigators who arrested him last year. He allegedly planned to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and hydrocodone pills to inmates for a payoff of $2,500.

Florida's corrections secretary, Walt McNeil, praised the investigators from his own department who cracked the case. Yet official annual reports suggest these investigators, like their counterparts in many states, are playing a frustrating version of Whack-a-Mole as they try to keep illegal drugs out of America's prisons.

In many large state prison systems, a mix of inmate ingenuity, complicit visitors and corrupt staff has kept the level of inmate drug abuse constant over the past decade despite concerted efforts to reduce it. A recent boom in cell phone smuggling has complicated matters, with inmates sometimes using phones to arrange drug deliveries.

"The prison wall is not a boundary anymore," said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for California's corrections department, which seized about 5,000 contraband cell phones in 2009 — more than triple the 2007 total.

Roughly 1,000 "drug incidents" are reported annually at California prisons — seizures of marijuana, heroin and other drugs. Between 2006 and 2008, 44 inmates in the state died of drug overdose deaths.

Florida has implemented anti-contraband strategies that its legislative watchdog office says match or exceed those in other states — including drug-detecting dog teams, metal detector searches of staff and visitors at all prisons, and even random pat-down searches of staff, rarely done in other states.

Yet despite these efforts, 1,132 random drug tests of inmates in 2008-09 were positive — the same positive rate of 1.6 percent as 10 years earlier. Even more striking, officers seized 2,832 grams of marijuana and 92 grams of cocaine at the prisons during the year, by far the highest figures of the past decade.

"People are always trying to smuggle drugs in," said Gretl Plessinger, the Florida Correction Department's spokeswoman. "Our ultimate goal is to get rid of it, but I'd be a fool to tell you that will ever be realized."

The canine teams are given partial credit for the surge in marijuana seizures, but there are only nine teams — rotating among 60 prisons.

Drugs reach inmates in numerous ways — via visiting relatives, by mail, through the complicity of prison staff, by inmates themselves who smuggle in drugs dropped off by associates at off-prison work sites.