THE new governor of Scotland's largest prison has warned drug-smuggling by inmates will always be a problem despite the introduction of a new CCTV system.
Ian Whitehead took up the job at Barlinnie in Glasgow earlier this year and the 50-year-old has insisted he will not tolerate drugs there.
He said a new CCTV system is now being fitted and he hopes that it will "minimise black spots".
But the former governor of HMP Shotts admits people will always find ways to smuggle drugs into prisons.
The number of recorded crimes of taking drugs into prisons in Glasgow has risen year on year, from zero in 2009/10 to 56 in 2013/14.
But Mr Whitehead said: "I would find it very difficult to believe that in any given year there were zero instances of drugs coming in to prison. I would say that would not be accurate.
"I'm not saying the police figures are wrong. What I'm saying is … I don't understand the context in which that information was gathered … and if the assumption people would make from that is that nothing happened in that year, of course something would have happened that year.
"It's inconceivable in any prison, and certainly in a place this size, that there would be zero activity in a year of something like that."
It emerged earlier this year that drugs were being put inside Kinder Eggs and thrown over the wall to inmates in the prison yard.
Mr Whitehead said: "There are productive ways of putting things into prisons - over walls in tennis balls, for example.
"We've found mobile phones - not cheap ones, sophisticated smart phones - taped together and wrapped in something soft so they don't break when they land.
"We've found drugs in the same sort of things. Perhaps in volleyballs, and over it comes. Kinder Eggs are an old favourite."
Hundreds of knives, razor blades and home-made weapons are found inside Barlinnie every year, figures released under Freedom of Information laws reveal.
Drugs, mobile phones, and homemade alcohol are also regularly found when staff search cells. 774 items were confiscated between April 2009 and April 2013, and the figure rises every year.
Mr Whitehead hopes Barlinnie's first state-of-art CCTV system will help him police the prison. He said: "It means you should have high-quality cameras which you can control, record and review. You then minimise the amount of black spots you have."
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