1/06/2010

Tens of millions pounds of taxpayers’ money is being spent on funding the heroin addictions of prisoners after a court ruled that it would be a breach of their human rights to allow them to go into ‘cold turkey’ while in prison.

A report by the Policy Exchange think tank has found that the number of inmates receiving heroin substitutes in prison is on the increase, at a cost of up to £15,000 per prisoner.

The report, entitled Coming Clean, says the result of the ruling is that 73,000 prisoners will be receiving medication for longer than three months.

This year £109.1million will be spent on the Integrated Drug Treatment System - with one in every six prisoners receiving a daily dose of a heroin substitute such as methadone.

The report has been published as the government agreed to pay out almost £750,000 to offenders as compensation for allowing them to suffer withdrawal symptoms while they were in prison.

Previously, inmates who entered the penal system with a heroin addiction were enrolled on a detoxification programme that would usually last no more than a few weeks.

However, following the ruling, the Department of Health has written to researchers confirming that de-tox programmes now regularly run for longer than three months per inmate.

Max Chambers, the report's author, said: 'The way the previous government approached the problem of drugs in prisons has clearly failed.

'It had become the easy option for prisoners' habits to simply be maintained by the state, with little effort made to properly address their addictions.

'The change of government is a real opportunity for the Department of Health to come clean about the mismanagement of the Integrated Drug Treatment System.

'We need much more focus on abstinence-based treatments that work and above all we need ministers, not prisoners, to be dictating Government policy.'

The report, based on a survey of 700 inmates in all 139 prisons in England and Wales, found that one in three inmates have used drugs while in jail.