Press Release
Government urged to make better use of its prisons’ drug-testing data – Royal Statistical Society
10 June 2008
Data held by the Ministry of Justice on nearly half a million urine samples in its random mandatory drugs testing (rMDT) of prisoners could be more effectively used, according to the Royal Statistical Society.
Public accountability and methodological scrutiny would benefit if the data gathered from prisons in England and Wales were properly analysed and fully published, the Society says. In addition, prisons’ related key performance indicator should be re-defined to differentiate between testing positive for opiates, such as heroin, and testing positive for cannabis.
Royal Statistical Society Vice-President, Professor Sheila Bird, says:
“The Ministry of Justice has data on nearly half a million urine samples from prisoners in England and Wales who have been subject to random mandatory drugs testing. These data have been costly to collect and are not analysed with sufficient rigour.
“A statistically sound analysis would allow the Government to learn more about the weekday pattern of prisoners’ use of specific illicit drugs and to gauge prisons’ success in offering substitution therapies such as methadone or buprenorphine. Full publication would ensure separation of the wheat (underlying yearly trends in prisoners’ use of specific drug) from the chaff (variation in how rMDT is implemented by different prisons across the years). Proper scrutiny of results on tens of thousands of rMDTs per annum requires more than headline figures that some percentage of rMDTs were ‘positive for drugs’.
“As presently worded, prisons’ key performance indicator on rMDT leads to a muddled situation. Positive tests for different drugs, for example heroin use in the past 2-3 days and cannabis use in the past 2 weeks are essentially being treated as equal, although clearly the health implications are very different.”
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