Eradicating drugs from prisons may be unrealistic, but it should be the goal

We are a year into the new government, and it is hard to detect that tolerance for drugs in prison is any closer to zero than it was before - (Getty)

The widespread availability of drugs in British prisons has long been among the more baffling conundrums of national life. How come institutions specifically built and managed to be secure have a drug problem that has, by common consent, reached crisis proportions? To put it another way, how can it be that places expressly designed to prevent people from getting out find it so difficult to stop illicit, and ever more harmful, substances from getting in?

The figures we report today are truly shocking – or they would be, were it not for the pervasive sense of resignation about everything that pertains to our prisons. The ubiquity of drugs then risks being seen as just one aspect of a disastrously failing system. It is more than that. It is at the root of many other prison problems.