While neighbouring NSW last year introduced full body X-ray scanning to prevent contraband entering its maximum-security Windsor jail, Canberra's only prison has decommissioned its state-of-the-art equipment.
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The ACT Justice and Community Safety directorate has confirmed its $49,000 Soter X-ray scanner, installed at the prison nine years ago, was used only on an "infrequent and intermittent basis" and was removed in December last year.
There is no intention to replace it.
"We rely on the most effective methods of detection to ensure that we both capture contraband and maintain security at the AMC [Alexander Maconochie Centre]. Noting this, the Soter body scanner had been used on very few occasions over the previous 24 months," a directorate statement said.
However, corrections staff say that the reason it was used so infrequently was that the machine was continually out of service, waiting on parts or repair for weeks at a time.
Each prisoner is permitted two one-hour visits per week, and more than 16,000 visitors entered the jail last year. Prison officers say physical searches of visitors to Canberra's prison are rare. Meanwhile, in NSW, non-medical X-ray scanning is regarded as a front-line weapon against the smuggling of prison contraband.
NSW Corrections says its full body scanner provides "the capacity to detect this contraband before it makes its way into our centres through the screening of all inmates that arrive ... and after each contact visit".
"Internally secreting items inside body cavities has become an effective method for inmates to not only smuggle in contraband but to move it around [the prison]," NSW Corrections said.
"The advent of mobile phones which are smaller and contain minimal metal components makes them easier to hide internally and harder to detect with existing technologies.
"Inmates can be scanned up to 150 times within a 12-month period without exceeding the prescribed radiation exposure levels."
Meanwhile, for its contraband prevention, the ACT prison now relies on "physical barriers, CCTV, intelligence-led interventions, patrols and 'passive alert detector' dog patrols".
Since mid-2017, a narcotics-detection dog has been used for random searches at the prison. However, the sniffer dog does not have the capability to locate contraband mobile phones, which one corrections source said existed "in prolific numbers" within the jail.
During 2017-18, ACT corrections officers performed 5418 location searches in the jail. Contraband was located in 611 instances.
