America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, even though America is not the most populous country in the world, with marketwatch.com, indicating that there are 2, 217,000 prisoners in America, a truly staggering amount of incarcerated people. Most of those that are incarcerated have a strong desire to have their love ones, friends, or just about anyone, come and visit them, of which there really isn't any good substitution for an actual physical meet between those that are incarcerated and those that are not.
For whatever reason, prisons and jails in all sorts of jurisdictions having been changing the rules in regards to who gets to visit, how they are allowed to visit, and whether the visit will even allow a physical meet of any sort. One of the reasons why those that incarcerate people, claim that they need to control those that visit their loved ones in prison, is that the incarceration institutions claim that those that visit, are the very people that are bringing in contraband, of which, though, there are a very small percentage of people so visiting, that do attempt to bring in contraband, categorically it can be stated that in actuality, this is not how contraband gets into prisons.
In point of fact, it is the very people that are minding the store, the correction officers, that bring in the contraband, for who else, knows everything about what is or is not monitored, and who else gets the free pass from other correction officers, when a scanner goes off, other than those same correction officers. The way that things work within an incarceration facility is a microcosm of how things work on the outside in the sense that those on the inside know the score and how to work the angles to benefit themselves, which is exactly what certain correction officers do in order to augment their salaries or to ingratiate themselves with people that can help them in one form or another.
Anyone that actually believes that all the contraband that gets into prisons, somehow is getting in via contact visitation, is far too credulous for their own good, for any specific visitor, is not only visiting for brief periods of time, in addition to those visits being infrequent, but also, visitors are quite aware that in many instances that they may be subjected to a real strip search themselves, or be denied their visitation rights, so that, basically no common sense visitor, will deliberately bring in any contraband, whatsoever.
As the nypost.com wrote in regards to a Department of Investigation (DOI) using an undercover agent, that "….one of its agents posing as a correction officer wasn’t stopped walking into two jails with a trove of contraband despite magnetometers that started ringing." The reason that so much contraband gets in time and time again, is because those that are incarcerated have a need for that contraband, and those correction officers providing that contraband are well compensated for it, in which, those that are the cleanest, from the incarcerated to the visitors, to the upstanding correction officers, suffer, because some of the incarcerated are privileged with that desirable contraband, while visitors are unfairly targeted as the distributors of such contraband, and honest correction officers are stuck in low paying dead-end jobs.