The Desperately Inventive Smuggle-Craft That Keep American Prisons High

You don’t have to be able to see through stone to realize just how fucked the American prison system is.

Where to even begin? There are the insane profits reaped by private prisons, for one, which are really just modern day chattel slave dens hiding under clean, unassuming logos slapped onto the banners of “job creation.” There’s all the rape and race warring, too. The beatings and killings. Regrettable facial tattoos. Drug use. Corruption. Recidivism.

Are these unique to American jailhouses? Of course not. Are they far more rampant stateside? Absolutely. This is the U.S., after all, which despite representing a mere 5 percent of all humans manages to cage a quarter of the world’s inmates. So not to get all Alex Jones on you, or anything, but the prison-industrial complex really is a giant, festering boil – maybe even the biggest of giant, festering boils – on the American nose tip. It’s sad and unsightly and impossible to not notice.

But for all the visible markings of a broken and overcrowded system, other traits go largely unseen. And this is precisely the point.

Prison is about being creative. By its very nature, in fact, serving time incubates creativity. And not just any old creativity – the confines of a 6 × 8 concrete cell fosters a sly, MacGyver-like tinkering. This cell craft is equally cunning and desperate, but is also fulfilling, a sort of shackled stand against the state. “The act of creation is empowering,” Katy Bolger writes in “What Paper Means in Prison,” “and gives prisoners some measure of control over their strictly monitored lives… And so an environment of oppression becomes the mother of invention.”

It makes total sense. When most (if not all) of your day consists of sitting and staring at the walls, the mind wanders. You start cooking up ways to do stuff. Like how to fashion your very own grill from nothing more than a channeled-out brick drawing electrical current from your cell wall. Or how to quietly tip off your buddy two cells down that the goons across the way plan to pound his ass tomorrow at recess. Or how to flat out escape. Or, failing that, how to get really, really high.

Drugs and prisons go arm in arm. They always have. “There are more than enough drug addicts doing a lot of time in prison,” writes Seth Ferranti, a former dealer and addict who found himself on the U.S. Marshals Top 15 Most Wanted list before being sentenced to 25 years in federal lock up. “Drugs were everywhere.”

Today, selling, running and using drugs are thriving markets in America’s prisons. (Ferranti, due for release in 2015, has been clean the past decade. And yet, “I have had plenty of chances,” he admits. “Drugs are still not hard to find in prisons.”) Just look at New Mexico, where prisons are being flooded with the opiate substitute Suboxone, which is weaker than methadone and easily smuggled when broken or smashed to traces.

It’s not just New Mexico. Prison staff in Maine, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania are reportedly dealing with upticks in Suboxone smuggling. And it’s sure as hell not just prescription, C-list heroin, either. Nearly every illicit substance available on the outside is available on the inside, and picking up from your guy over by the chin-up bars can be as easy as scoring in Brooklyn on a Tuesday afternoon.

Like the ingenious smuggle tech of Mexican cartels relentlessly moving product over (and under) the border and into the states, American prisoners stop at nothing to not only smuggle in drugs, but to then push or mule the contraband or conceal personal stashes. The smuggle craft of jailed Americans looking to turn a quick profit – or just pass the time stoned – are wildly inventive and as wide ranging as the drugs themselves.

Let’s just get this one out of the way. It’s a not-so-trusty standby, shoving stuff into your person. But people do it, anyway. Pictured here is the work of one Neil Lansing, a 35-year-old sentenced on possession charges last year in Florida. When he showed up on Day 1, a routine bodily inspection had prison officials maybe not entirely surprised to find Lansing hauling a truly “remarkable array” of contraband, all pouched into a condom and shoved up his anus.

It may not look like much, that darkish bulb. But it towed over two dozen items: 17 Oxy pills, six matches, one cigarette, an empty syringe (with eraser stopper), one flint, one lip balm container, a condom, a CVS receipt, and a paper coupon. Ouch.

A great deal of drugs find their way to inmates through family, friends and lovers (whose innocent kisses can easily pass off drug-filled mini balloons) during visitation hours. And even when visits aren’t offered it’s as easy as mailing a letter. Strips and tabs fit perfectly under paid postage.

Just bore out a heel hole and take drugs on the run.

Funneling drugs into the jail system can be as simple as the primitive art of throwing things.

It’s the brazen equivalent of Sinaloa catapults launching bushels of weed over the border fence: Outsiders (often recently released prisoners familiar with perimeter-sweep schedules) will stuff basketballs, footballs and tennis balls, or whatever else, with product, and then Hail Mary the bastards, all stitched up nice and tight, over the fence into the yard.

In Columbia, carrier pigeons (mule-pigeons?) have been known to airmail that yeyo into the clink.

Again, mail bombs. Certain drugs can be melted down and smeared (like the smudged Suboxone, pictured) onto the pages of magazines or, to be doubly covert, your kid’s coloring book. Just look for the page marked “To Daddy.”

Paper communiqués, known as kites or lines, are pervasive in the smuggling arsenal. The stash you were promised is taped under the east end of mess hall table No. 4. You’ll see.

When all else fails, you’ve probably got a guy in a crooked warden. Sometimes the man is your best friend.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

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