The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) has released a report on sentencing for contraband violations in federal prisons between 2019 and 2023. The June 17 special edition of the USSC’s “QuickFacts” series used data from 852 sentences, and focused on the three categories of contraband deemed to represent the greatest threats to a prison’s safety and security: drugs, weapons and of course cell phones. The “drugs” category does not include alcohol or tobacco, which the Bureau of Prisons considers negligible while there are so many more dangerous things in the supply. Like cell phones.
It also does not include synthetic cannabinoids, despite the fact that corrections departments across the country are pushing through mail bans and other restrictions under the pretext of stopping the dangerous epidemic of synthetic cannabinoids pouring in by mail.
The substance involved in more contraband sentencing than any other that made it into the USSC data—nearly half the drug convictions altogether—was buprenorphine, AKA Suboxone. Synthetic cannabinoids are almost certainly more common than buprenorphine at the facilities included in the USSC data, and out of all contraband substances are uniquely despised by corrections officers.
While it’s true there are lots of synthetic cannabinoids in prisons, anytime a corrections department or elected official announces that they’ve been discovered they’re reliably using drug-checking equipment that’s notorious for false positives, without ever confirming the results. Because they really never need to: These results can be used to sanction people in custody, and to generate clicky headlines, whether or not they’re accurate. The only reason to ever go to the trouble of confirming the results at a forensics lab is if the results need to hold up in court. Which may explain why they’ve awkwardly disappeared from the USSC sentencing data.
Prisons have a very different drug supply than the free world, with very different harms because it’s not opioid-based. It’s more accurate to think of it as stimulant-based. Before the COVID-19 pandemic the common substances were generally methamphetamine, Suboxone and synthetic cannabinoids. But since then, the supply has begun to splinter—in a similar way to how the free-world drug supply is moving beyond fentanyl—and these days it’s dominated by unknown substances that fall under the catch-all term “strips” and the ever-evolving category of synthetic cannabinoids.
Synthetic cannabinoids are much more difficult than other substances to accurately detect with the kind of drug-checking equipment that a layperson can use, which is part of why prison staff are constantly producing false positives. On the other hand, one of the easiest contraband drugs to accurately identify, if you’re not a forensic scientist, is a bright-orange square of Suboxone.
Suboxone strips are popular in prison because they’re already formulated in a way that’s easy to conceal. They’re also relatively easy to detect—hidden underneath the stamps on letters, for example—if the people looking for contraband are more motivated to search the incoming mail than to search themselves or their colleagues.
Neither the possession nor provision of weapons generally involves anyone besides prisoners, because the weapons are homemade. Whereas with drugs and especially with cell phones, it’s widely established that the main suppliers are corrections officers. So the discovery of Suboxone in incoming mail tends to be somewhat better represented in this kind of data than the discovery of contraband phones brought in by corrections officers.
The average sentence for contraband weapons convictions was 20 months. For drugs, 16 months. For cell phones, five months. However, cell phones made up nearly half of all contraband included in the report.
USSC sentencing guidelines group various convictions together by how serious they’re perceived to be; everything in the same group gets assigned the same base level number. Each person, meanwhile, is assigned to a category between 1 and 6 based on their prior convictions, and after some additional adjustments for various extenuating circumstances, this equation spits out a standard range for the number of extra months the person is expected to serve in prison.
So in the context of prison contraband, for example, providing or possessing a weapon (assuming the weapon wasn’t a firearm) starts with a base level 13. Providing or possessing a cell phone starts at a 6. For drugs, it depends—LSD, PCP, methamphetamine and narcotics (AKA opioids) are in the same category as weapons. All other controlled substances, including alcohol, are in the same category as cell phones.
Not that harsher sentencing is justified for anyone, but it is worth noting that in the free world any movement toward decriminalizing something (drug possession; sex work) tends to be rationalized through way more criminalization of anyone accused of supplying it (drug distribution; human trafficking). Feds say they want to punish the suppliers, not the users, until it’s time to punish the most dangerous contraband of all: cell phones. Then we just punish the users, not the suppliers who profit.
Images via United States Sentencing Commission
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