Banning greeting cards won’t keep spice out of our prisons

The last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of letters and cards invisibly impregnated with the stuff which prisoners then smoked or licked. Wings and landings filled with zombified inmates in a haze of toxic smoke that felled officers were not an uncommon sight. The addictive qualities of this junk resulted in a spiral of debt, predation and lawlessness that threw rehabilitation out the cell window.

So the news that this large Hertfordshire medium-security jail is banning all cards and photographs to inmates, except those generated remotely via commercial outlets such as Moonpig and Freeprints, represents a welcome effort to remove the awful scourge of synthetic drugs that disfigures prisons with brutality and despair.