This ruling only covers those who were already undergoing treatment involving the use of medication prior to being sent to prison.
In reality, it isn’t even a ruling, because this is an out of court settlement, albeit in expectation of losing in court itself.
It doesn’t set precedents, nor is any liabilityaccepted.
Maybe it will provide an impetus for more detox facilities, the way the English Prison Service is organised, its pretty much centred around achieving numbers in boxes rather than actually addressing the problem.
The system of UK prisons inspections, Key Performance Indicators, targets etc is very much like Heisenburgs uncertainty principle.
By making measurements you can change the properties of the quantity being evaluated, such that you cannot be absolutely certain of the facts, this is exactly what happens in the Prison Service.
Standards are set based upon supposedly Key Markers, for example, a Prison will be told to carry out drug testing, and based upon the years number of positive tests, a target will be set to reduce that number for the following year.
There are so many ways to distort this, how about the following - you can ensure that in your first year you make sure you target all known drug users, this ensures you have a high number of positive tests to start with, its much easier to go down from a high number than from a low number.
The following year, you make sure you do not test for drugs on a weekend, this ensures a reduction in positives, because hard drugs will be consumed on a Friday, and these will mostly be out of the system by Monday morning, which is when weekday testing resumes.
You could also target those who you know are clean, which means that your number of positive tests falls, and hey presto, your jail has now achieved its target of ‘reducing drug abuse’.
Many UK prisons have ‘frequent testing’ units, where prisoners will be tested more often, and naturally those who do not take drugs will make up a higher proportion of their population, and magically it makes the jail look good.
Obviously the rest of the jail is rife with drugs, but doesn’t make as many drug tests as the frequent testing units so this does not hurt the numbers so much.
There are so many differant ways that the numbers are manipulated to achieve the so called improvements, wether it is reductions in assaults and bullying, or just completion of offending behaviour courses.
The result is that although numbers are being gathered, the actual effect of doing this in order to meet targets so distorts reality that its very difficult to have a true picture of what is really going on.
In truth, UK jails do not have many true detox units at all, because this involves certain security and isolation facilities, along with the medical support and so many other things that UK few UK jails are equipped to do this work properly.
If you really wanted to carry out true drug rehab and detox, the first thing you would do would be to ensure no physical contact between visitors and prisoners, this would have to take place behind screens.Visitors are how the majority of drugs get into prison.
The rehab population would have to be isolated from other drugs sources, so in effect you would need another prison inside the prison, so that they could not get drugs from other prisoners. You would also need to ensure that prisoners do not have the assets to purchase drugs, by strictly limiting the money they are having sent into prison by relatives, personally I would stop all money coming in but there are other reasons why this is done, few of which I feel are in the prisoners own interest, and everything to do with the interests of the Prison Service.
You would also need to install jamming devices for mobile phones, this is the way many drugs transactions are carried out, cash is sent from one address to another, and upon clearance of funds, the drugs are supplied to the user.(prisoners are not allowed to have moblile phones, but then, they are not allowed many things and still they obtain them)
Unfortunately there is a law that forbids the use of devices that jam electrically transmitted communications.
All goods coming into such a place would have to be searched, and given the amount of material that moves in and out of prison, such as clothing, food and a thousand other things, it would mean a large and specialised search team.
All staff would have to be searched, and drug dogs on duty with their handlers most of the day - most UK prisons do not have their own dog units.
All this is just for starters, you would need to have specialist counsellors, pschologists, seperate employment and training facilities, and upon release from prison there would need to be extensive supervision in the community, unlike the joke that we currently use, you would need to get these individuals into employment (assuming you could actually train them to do something useful. like read and write) the list is almost endless.
The result is that our genuine detox units are way oversubscribed.
We all know what to do about it, the measures are expensive, they are not easy, but the reality is that Joe Public is not going to vote for a political party that promises more spending on criminals unless it involves locking them up forever, Joe Public is not interested in the slightest in rehabilitation, but is rather keen on revenge. I’m not surprised by this, and I understand the reasons for this point of view, its just how it happens to be.