How Do Drugs and Other Illegal Items Make it Inside Prisons?

Where I’m housed, the answer has always been simple.

Damian Delune
4 min readSep 9, 2023
Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash

People often have the mistaken impression that drugs and other illicit substances are brought into prisons by inmates due to what they see on television and in movies. Shows like Orange is the New Black, Sons of Anarchy, Mayans, and the more recent Mayor of Kingstown show those who are incarcerated being drug kingpins from the inside, running large drug cartels from behind bars.

According to these shows, even on the inside, drugs for the junkies housed behind bars are readily available by being smuggled in the fresh fruits and veggies brought into the prison kitchens.

That’s where your first red flag should fly.

Fresh fruits and veggies? Where? Not where I’m housed. I won’t say my camp is the same as every prison. I can’t be the spokesperson for every single prison in the United States, or even in North Carolina (there are 50 plus men’s prisons alone in my state), but based on the places I’ve been so far, I can tell you, fresh fruits and vegetables don't happen within this system so that just isn’t how drugs come into prisons.

You need to keep in mind, a lot of what you see on television is Hollywood posturing and it is for entertainment purposes. The…

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Damian Delune

Incarcerated writer sharing real stories about life on the inside, through my wife, Demeter Delune (editor, publisher, promoter, responder)