• By GREG GARLAND
• Advocate Westside bureau
• Published: Apr 26, 2009 - Page: 1A

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

ANGOLA — The walls of Lt. Joseph Russell’s security office at Louisiana State Penitentiary are covered with dozens of snapshots of illegal drugs, homemade knives and other prohibited items corrections officers have found on inmates, visitors and staff at the sprawling prison.

The photos starkly illustrate a problem that prisons across the nation face— keeping contraband out and finding prohibited items that inmates try to hide from the correctional staff.

Prison experts say it is impossible to keep out all contraband, despite the best efforts of prison administrators and security staff.

Louisiana, which implemented extensive court-ordered prison reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, does a better job than most, said Jim Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association.

 “Angola is a picture-perfect example of how their system has turned around,” Gondles said.

Angola had a fearsome reputation as the bloodiest prison in America before the federal courts intervened to force changes in how that prison and others were managed.

Gondles noted that Louisiana is one of only 14 states whose prisons are fully accredited by the corrections association.

The state has just under 20,000 inmates in 11 state-run and two privately managed prisons. To achieve accreditation, prisons must show they adhere to national standards set by corrections experts, he said.

But even well-run prisons confront problems with contraband.

“It’s like fishing, you can’t catch them all,” Angola Warden Burl Cain said.

According to statistics compiled by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, illegal drugs were found inside state prisons on 1,265 occasions from 2006 to 2008.

During the same three-year period, urinalysis tests conducted on inmates registered positive for drugs 1,402 times.

The prison system conducts more than 40,000 such tests each year, records show.