Mattress and personal belongings scanner

Background

There is no doubt that contrabands including drugs, phones and sharps in prisons are a major threat. Whilst X-ray Body Scanners have been a ‘contraband game changer’ in those prisons that have installed them it is not the total solution to the problem.

There are two reasons for this:

• Other ways of getting items into prisons exist, over the wall, etc.
• A significant amount of contraband within the prison exists.

The prisoners do have a problem – where do they hide the contraband? Usual places are within their cells to keep an eye on their contraband.

Hiding places are carefully chosen to be hard to find: the spine of books for SIM-cards, inside toothpaste for pills/drugs and, a favourite, inside mattresses. Mattresses are used as they are very difficult to search as the items are small, the mattresses hard to compress and, if the hidden items are sharps/needles, they are a threat to the searching officer.

Traditionally either the mattresses have not been properly checked or they have been dragged to a 100100 X-ray scanner – a labour intensive process as the X-ray machine is usually installed in a fixed location a long way from the cell. There is also the problem that once one mattress is dragged off other prisoners realise what is happening and so they remove contraband from their cells.

BV MAX X-ray image

Solution

LINEV Systems has developed a compact easily-moveable X-ray scanner – the BV MAX Cell Search – that can be used to screen mattresses. It can be moved through standard doorways and so taken to the cell landings so that the mattresses can be scanned within a few meters of the cell in a few seconds.

In addition to scanning mattresses the system can be used to X-ray scan prisoner’s personal possessions at the same time – as a result a complete cell contents search can be performed in minutes.

LINEV Systems BV MAX

BV MAX / Cell Search

The system has been trialled in a prison in Australia – in the cells searched a significant number of mattresses were identified as containing contraband (images shown below). The prison officers had hand-searched the mattresses before they were scanned. As a result of the success, these systems have been purchased.

Images of actual finds in initial trial in Australian prison

Conclusion

The combination of a LINEV Systems Body Scanner and the LINEV Systems BV MAX/Cell Search gives a quantum step forward in reducing the amount of contraband within prisons.