Smuggling drugs into a prison evidently happens all too frequently, according to Jerry. They come via many different avenues. Once when I was visiting, soon after the inmate arrived and spoke to his female visitor, she walked over to one of the guards and asked him to unlock the bathroom. I noticed that Jerry watched her with some curiosity. A minute or two after she returned to the prisoner, guards rushed in and escorted him firmly out of the visiting area. She and those with her were also led out. Jerry said she had probably been carrying drugs.
While you are randomly searched when you visit a prison, it is not a cavity search, so evidently she was hiding drugs somewhere. I won’t speculate where that was.
He told another story about a couple of inmates at one prison who used a “mule” to bring in drugs. Mule is a slang term for someone who carries drugs, and in this case the man would swallow bags and then pass them out of his body when he went to the bathroom. The mule might have left the prison to go to court or had some other reason to be outside. In this case, the inmates grew tired of waiting for him to pass the drugs, so they cut him open.
He told me other similar stories but you get the idea.
Drugs are more available to some than to others. Once, Jerry was in the same cell block with John Gotti, Nicky Scarfo, and the head of the Cali Cartel. You don’t think they couldn’t get drugs if that was their desire? But none of them used. Jerry says he has never used, only tasting cocaine one occasion.
In later posts, I’ll tell some of the stories he regaled me with about famous cell mates.