Drugs worth £100m 'traded in jails'

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Huseyin Djemil, former head of drug treatment policy at the National Offender Management Service, told BBC Radio 4's The Investigation programme, that the prison service has not yet grasped the scale of the drugs market inside UK jails.

He estimated that in a worst case scenario, 20kg of drugs are being smuggled into prisons each week.

This total, amounting to more than 1,000kg annually, holds a street value of about £100 million per year, he said.

Explaining his estimate, he told the BBC: "What you'd have to do to get the size of the market, you'd have to make some assumptions - what will these people typically use?

"In the community they will use - left unrestricted - half a gram of a Class A powder a day.

"If you translate that in a prison context and assume that because of the bars and the locks and the fences and all the rest of it, that they would use half a gram a week as an average, you're looking at 20 kilos a week to supply the national market."

Mr Djemil also said that prison staff involvement in the drugs trade is a "white elephant" that needs to be tackled in order to reduce the flow of drugs in jail.

The Ministry of Justice said every effort was being made to tackle the use of drugs in prisons.

A National Offender Management Service spokeswoman said that since 1996/7 positive random Mandatory Drugs Tests in prisons have fallen by 64%. A review has also been set up to look at how to reduce the amount of drugs circulating within UK prisons, she said.