Sir, - Mr Myers had some fun at our expense (An Irishman's Diary July 10th), where he mocked the Prisons Service drug-free regime plans.
Mr Myers seemed to find it incredible that we could not ensure zero drug misuse throughout the prisons, as a matter of course.
The simple fact of the matter is that with 11,000 committals to Irish prisons per annum, many prisoners come into our system with drugs concealed internally which can only be found through invasive body cavity searches of a type which would breach their human rights in an unacceptable fashion. Your newspaper would be well to the fore in condemning us if we employed such methods.
In brief, our approach to drug misuse among prisoners is in line with State healthcare policy, to encourage abstinence checked by voluntary random urine testing, where appropriate, to generally maintain short-term prisoners on methadone where they were already on such medication on committal and to use such searches and controls as are lawful to keep illegal drugs out of the prison system.
The drug-free regime option offers the prisoner who is recovering from addiction or who wants nothing to do with drugs a secure setting in which to get through his or her sentence whilst availing of the full range of rehabilitating opportunities in our system. It also frees up prison resources to concentrate our more traditional preventative actions among non-compliant prisoners: searches etc.
The recent direction by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, to accelerate the development of drug-free regimes across the prison system - as reported in The Irish Times by Nuala Haughey on July 5th - represents a rational extension of this approach. - Yours, etc.,
Jim Mitchell, Press Officer, The Irish Prisons Service, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2.