[DanBC]

We know that some prisoners continue to commit crime, and that they use mobile phones to do so.

I'm strongly in favour of rehabilitation. I don't think prison works and it should be used far less than it is. But even I think that control of mobile phones is important.

And it's not just about phones. A prisoner could easily pack Stanley knife blades in a safe package and put those up his anus.

There are some important human rights balances here. We can't insert fingers into the anus of all prisoners just in case, but we do need to protect prisoners from violent crime.

This is especially true because there are a range of different types of detention against your will - patients in a mental health hospital on a short assessment stay; people in a police cell overnight; medium term patients in MH hospital; long term patients in a forensic hospital (they committed an act of serious violence while they were mentally ill and were sent to hospital); long term prisoners who keep committing acts of violence while in prison. We can't perform the same levels of checking on all of them.

There has been some work on this, on checking what type of airport scanners work or don't work for detecting blades. It's a bit scary to see what gets through.