New body scanner hopes to stop contraband smuggling at Regina jail

With the short slide of a platform and a slight whirring sound, guards at the Regina Provincial Correctional Centre can use their newest piece of equipment to see inside a person and, potentially, stop smuggling into the jail.

It’s a large grey body scanner and it was installed in the intake at the jail this spring, but it became operational at the beginning of October.

Only inmates are taken through the scanner. Julien Hulet, the director of the Regina Provincial Correctional Centre, confirmed that guards are viewed as above suspicion.

The scanner uses a low-dose X-ray to look at a person inside and out so the guards, using different filters, can determine whether there’s anything on, or in, the person that needs to be removed.

There’s also an “amnesty box” where people can get rid of anything before going into the scanner that they may have been trying to smuggle into the jail.

“Our intent is to not have it enter into the facility,” explained Hulet. “So people will be given an option to void themselves of this product. There’s an amnesty box and you can go in there, no questions asked. We just don’t want it in our building.”

Since the scanner started operating in October, six instances of smuggling have been caught — three in the scanner and three through the amnesty box. Hulet said the contraband included cannabis, purple rock heroin, and tobacco.

Hulet said drugs are one of the problems guards deal with at the jail. Close to 75 per cent of the men who go through provincial facilities across the province have issues that need to be addressed through abstinence or programming.

Drugs can be bad for inmates who are trying to do programming and rehabilitate themselves. And Hulet said they’re also bad for staff.

“(It’s a problem) if someone has powder or pills in their cells,” Hulet said, “and being contaminated poses a severe or a serious risk for our staff that have to work in this facility.”

Drugs are also big for gangs in the jails.

“You have a competing interest around a commodity that people are trying to generate revenue from, so this machine will allow us to stop (or) put the brakes on those activities,” said Hulet.

Stopping drugs from getting into the jail is one way of stopping those problems.

The Ministry of Justice has plans to roll out scanners at two other facilities — in Saskatoon and Prince Albert — by the spring.