Controlling Contraband

And though family members, friends and even inmates themselves are usually responsible for bringing in the contraband, occasionally, like in Segura's case, those to blame are the very people tasked with keeping it out.

Banned items find way into Texas prisons - at times with jailers' occasionally

Occasionally? What an incredibly naive way to look at contraband. You take undereducated, under-trained people and throw them into some of the scariest places in the USA, and then you barely pay them for it. And they are expected to rise to the occasion, become the best of the best, the cream of the crop and someone the Government can rely on, even though daily they are faced with opportunities to make a lot more money. And you think this only happens occasionally?

Here's the only way to fight contraband in prison:

1. Educate Correctional Officers in the field of criminal psychology, sensitivity training, problem solving and non-lethal self-defense techniques so that they feel safer.

2. Allow inmates free access to phones to call any number they want, providing the owner on the other end has agreed to receive calls from this inmate.

3. Give inmates something to do. More sports, more movies, more television, more music.

4. Treat, properly, any inmates with drug problems.

5. Educate all inmates - sensitivity training, trades, scholarly subjects, racial issues.

6. Reward good behavior. Reward contraband-free cells. Real rewards, something they would actually want. A steak dinner, a dvd player. A legal cell phone for a week.

7. Pay COs that follow this regime, more.

A concept that governments in all states and most countries don't really get, is that when you give, freely, your subjects the things you don't want them to have, you have gained control over it. There are two choices with contraband of all kinds, in prisons and outside of them. Either see the items passing hands in the shadows and catch a slight portion of it and punish, or hand it out and see it out in the open, know where it is at all times and control it. Use it as leverage.

Of course, I don't apply this to weapons, but sensitivity training and education on racial issues should lower the need for weapons in prison - though I don't think anything could ever eliminate them entirely.

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