“We’re ready for it if contraband increases,” said Julian Kennelly from the Community and Public Sector Union, which includes prison officers.

Loading

He said officers had previously found tabs of synthetic drugs stitched into shirt collars and baseball caps and embedded in letter seals – a long way from “the early days of the women’s jail at Deer Park [now the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre] when it was as unsophisticated as throwing tennis balls over the fence”.

Smugglers turned to drones to keep their customers in supply during the visitor lockout. The Age revealed last year that Corrections Victoria recorded 97 security incident reports about remotely piloted vehicles between March and early November, an increase of 246 per cent on the full year before the COVID-19 crisis.

Prisons have installed drone-detection technology at the five facilities considered most at risk.

Legislation also came into effect in November last year allowing prison staff to provide photocopies of mail to inmates instead of the originals. This was designed to prevent buprenorphine, a substitute for heroin and methadone and common in Victorian jails, being smuggled to inmates inside letters and drawings.

“Victoria’s prison system has one of the toughest and most extensive detection regimes in Australia – the use of drone-detection technology, perimeter patrols, drug-detection dogs, CCTV and prison intelligence operations along with scanners all contribute to foiling attempts of contraband entering the system,” Corrections Minister Natalie Hutchins said.

“Corrections Victoria recently introduced new body scanners across the system in anticipation of in-person visits resuming and this additional measure complements the detection systems already in place.”