Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Justice – in the House of Commons am 2:30 pm ar 10 Tachwedd 2009.
There are substantial penalties. One measure that I introduced at the beginning of 1999, when I was Home Secretary, significantly tightened up the checking and vetting of visitors to prisons, who are one of the major sources of the drugs that are smuggled in, and the penalties for such visitors if they transgressed the rules, as well as imposing clear penalties on prisoners who receive drugs or who conspire with visitors in that respect. This is a challenge-there is no question about it-not least because prisoners seek to conceal both drugs and mobile telephones in an obscene way in their body orifices. Detecting the smuggling of drugs and mobile telephones into prison is difficult, and so we have tightened controls and introduced these body orifice scanners.