Full-body scanners are soon coming to the state’s prisons and jails.
Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan signed a $2 million bill this week that funds their placement in all three state prisons and gives grants to counties that want to install the scanners at local jails.
“Preventing illicit substances from entering state prisons is important to combating the heroin and opioid crisis,” Hassan said in a statement. “Body scanners can be an important tool to help prevent dangerous and addictive illicit substances from entering state correctional facilities and ending up in the hands of prisoners.”
As New Hampshire battles an ongoing opioid crisis, prison officials are looking for new ways to clamp down on the presence of drugs behind bars.
The bill calls for six scanners to be placed in all three state prisons at a cost of $1.1 million. A new $740,000 grant program would help put scanners in the county jails. The legislation stipulates the machines only create images that “enable the detection of contraband,” but not display or record private body parts. The law requires staff, visitors and inmates to pass through the scanners.
The state Department of Corrections doesn’t track how many drugs are confiscated in the men’s prisons in Berlin and Concord, and the women’s prison in Goffstown. But within the last year, prison officials wrote 18 citations to Concord inmates, 13 to Berlin inmates and six to Goffstown inmates for being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, records show.
Prison officials have acknowledged drugs getting into prisons, and it isn’t always through the front door.
Over a six-month period, corrections workers spotted drones flying over the Concord prison nine times spanning 2015 and 2016 and worried they could be used to drop drugs, weapons or other contraband.
Two competing bills regulating drone use, including limiting flights near prisons, died when legislators failed to reach a compromise.
(Allie Morris can be reached at 369-3307, amorris@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @amorrisNH.)