T

he fact that Nusakambangan prison island is Indonesia’s only maximum security prison has not prevented it from being the target of illegal drug distribution.

So far, prison guards have not been able to solve this problem, with officials from the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) having in the past two months arrested inmates whose urine tests came back positive for drug use.

Nusakambangan prison guards are now attempting to cut drug distribution lines running into the prison. In the past three days, they have not only searched through goods and belongings of all visitors entering the prison, but also had them undergo urine testing. The tests have been held at Wijayapura ferry port before visitors sail to Nusakambangan Island.

“Based on our monitoring, there are still drugs being distributed inside Nusakambangan prisons. We are still having difficulty preventing the influx of drugs into the prisons. What we’ve been doing lately is conducting urine tests on visitors,” head of the BNN Cilacap office Adj. Sr. Comr. Edy Santosa told the media at the Wijayapura ferry complex on Wednesday.

Twenty-eight visitors who arrived to cross to Nusakambangan had their urine tested on Wednesday. Two of them tested positive for Benzodiazepines (BZD), Edy said, but immediately clarified that they had both been consuming the drug for medical reasons.

Edy said that such measures were being taken now particularly because of the upcoming execution of drug convicts on Nusakambangan. “There is the possibility that the drugs convicts could hold a ‘shabu [crystal meth] party’ before they are put before the firing squad for execution.”

The urine tests, he continued, had significantly reduced the potential influx of drugs into Nusakambangan’s prisons.

“There used to be numerous visitors to Nusakambangan. However, since we started holding urine tests, numbers have significantly decreased,” Edy said.

As reported earlier, nine Nusakambangan inmates tested positive for shabu in tests held by the BNN Cilacap office and military and police personnel at end of last month. Ironically, the nine were inmates of the island’s narcotics prison.

The discovery of a drug trade in Nusakambangan’s prisons is not entirely new as such practices have reportedly been going on for a long time with the alleged assistance of the prison guards themselves.

In one March 2011 case, three key Nusakambangan officials were found to be involved in the illegal distribution of drugs. They were caught in a massive operation held by the local BNN office.

One of the arrested officials, Marwan Adli, was at the time head of the Nusakambangan Narcotics Prison. He was netted along with two subordinates when the three were caught facilitating an illegal drug trade being run from behind the prison bars by an inmate, Hartoni.

It was later revealed in court that the drug business had yielded billions of rupiah for Marwan, who had by then funneled the money to his family members, who then opened up various businesses to help disguise their money laundering. Marwan was sentenced to 13 years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of Rp 10 billion (US$737,000) by the Cilacap District Court in 2012.