PRISONERS have revealed that drugs are so rife in open prisons that they are seeking transfers to higher security jails to avoid them. Inmates are deliberately walking out of prison or reoffending so as to avoid being pressured into buying heroin, cannabis or crack cocaine.

Mike Trace, chief executive of Rapt, the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust, the main prisons drugs charity, and formerly the deputy drugs czar, said lax conditions in open prisons were undoing the good work of the government’s £80m-a-year antidrugs programme.

“Open prisons have been allowed to become pretty free and easy places. There is a very available drug culture and a lot of peer pressure and intimidation for people to take drugs or become involved in the drug market,” he said.

“Open prisons are the last place you want to put somebody who has been on a drug treatment programme.”

Shane Jones, 26, from Leigh, Lancashire, who was jailed for robbery that was linked to his heroin addiction, came off drugs while at Forest Bank, a category B prison in Salford, Greater Manchester.

However, on his transfer to Kirkham open prison, in Lancashire, he came under intense pressure from dealers. In May he decided the only way to avoid becoming addicted again was to walk out, according to Philip Martin, the barrister who represented him at Liverpool crown court after he absconded.

“He had been clean and he had lots of certificates to show that he was clean. He had pleaded with the prison authorities not to send him to Kirkham,” said Martin.

“When he got there he mentioned it to his prison officer. They wouldn’t do anything about it, so in the end he walked out, went straight to the police and basically asked to be taken back to prison.”

Jones was returned to Forest Bank and was given an extra four months on his sentence.

Rapt runs 10 of the 20 intensive drug treatment programmes in British jails but there are none available in the open prisons. While those inmates who come off drugs are put in drugs-free wings, there is no segregation in open prisons. A drugs treatment programme costs £3,500.

Drugs charities believe the figures understate the problem, as inmates have moved from taking cannabis, which is easily detectable, to heroin, which passes through the body’s digestive system within 72 hours.

Simon Creighton, one of the country’s top prison lawyers, said: “I have one client who has absconded five times. He is vociferous that the problem is drugs.

“When prisoners who have had drugs problems get to open prisons there is very, very little support there.”

Some prisoners resort to reoffending. One former prisoner, who turned down a transfer to an open prison because he had been told of the drugs problems, said: “You get people who cut themselves up, they blockade themselves in their cells. They just keep causing trouble.”

Courts have heard a procession of inmates blaming drugs for their decision to walk out of open prisons. In June, Ian Norton, 34, who was serving time for burglary, walked out of Sudbury open prison, Derbyshire, after begging not to be sent there. He claimed he had been offered drugs within hours of his arrival.

In April, Craig McCusker walked out of Castle Huntly open prison near Dundee because, he told the court, the prisoners were “all using drugs and sharing needles”.

He was free for just 30 minutes before he was rearrested and he cheered in court when he was sent back to a higher security jail.

Kannan Siva, a solicitor, said he was baffled by a system that worked hard to get prisoners off drugs, only to founder as they approached freedom.

Siva, who defended Stewart Lee Boardman, 27, who had absconded from Leyhill prison, Gloucestershire, said: “The prisoner is surrounded by temptation and all the good work appears to be undone.”

The Ministry of Justice said it does not record the reasons given by prisoners for why they walk out of jail. Last year 704 inmates absconded from open prisons.

A prison officer working in an open prison, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “They [the prisoners] come in at four o’clock and by six o’clock they have been offered drugs. They rant and rave until we put them in the cells to be transferred.”

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