Every correctional facility in the country is fighting the same quiet war. It isn’t fought at the front gate with metal detectors alone — it’s fought against contraband that’s swallowed, hidden internally, or tucked into places a pat-down will never reach. For decades, the only real answer to that problem was the strip search: invasive, time-consuming, and still not foolproof. Today, more facilities are turning to a different tool — full-body scanning technology — and the officers using it every day are seeing results that go far beyond a few confiscated pills.
We sat down with two corrections professionals who are living this shift firsthand: Lt. Rivas of the Sandoval County Detention Center, and Mark Gallegos of the Lee County Jail. Their stories, told in their own words below, make the case better than any product spec sheet could.
“We See That Something Is Inside the Body”
[EMBED VIDEO 1 — Lt. Rivas, Sandoval County Detention Center]
Before Sandoval County Detention Center brought in a body scanner, staff relied on strip searches — a method that, as Lt. Rivas explains, has a built-in blind spot. “We won’t see anything on the outer part of the body,” he says, describing how inmates would end up smuggling drugs inside the facility and distributing them to other inmates once inside. A strip search can catch what’s visible. It can’t catch what’s been swallowed or concealed internally, and that gap was exactly what inmates were exploiting.
The scanner closed it. Now, no one enters general population until staff have a clear scan. That single procedural change — hold until cleared — has altered the calculus for the people trying to beat the system. Lt. Rivas notes that Sandoval County sees a high number of repeat offenders, and repeat offenders learn how a facility operates. They know the scanner will find what a strip search would have missed, and that knowledge is changing behavior before an inmate ever steps into the scanner. Some surrender contraband voluntarily. Others admit it when directly asked. And when neither happens, the scan simply confirms what staff already suspect, and the contraband is recovered before it ever reaches a housing unit.
That’s the piece worth sitting with: the technology isn’t just catching contraband, it’s *preventing the attempt* in the first place. A visible, consistently enforced scanning policy becomes its own form of deterrence — inmates stop trying because they know trying won’t work.
“That’s a Correlation I Believe Is Causation”
[EMBED VIDEO 2 — Mark Gallegos, Lee County Jail]
If Lt. Rivas’s story is about deterrence, the account from Lee County is about scale and downstream impact. In the very first week their body scanner was operational, staff recovered more than 100 fentanyl pills and 400 strips of Suboxone — a haul that, without the scanner, would likely have made it into general population undetected.
But the number that stands out most isn’t the contraband count. It’s what happened to use-of-force incidents afterward. “Last month we only had one use of force inside of our facility,” Mark Gallegos explains, contrasting that with a facility that historically logged a much higher rate. Their read on it is direct: “I think that we’re correlating that the, you know, hard to get drugs into the facility will reduce the violence inside the facility as well.”
That’s not a casual observation — it lines up with what the research on drug availability inside correctional facilities has consistently found.
Why Fewer Drugs Means Fewer Incidents
The link between contraband drugs and facility violence isn’t anecdotal. Research funded by the National Institute of Justice has found that the drug trade inside correctional facilities functions as a lucrative criminal enterprise, and inmate gangs often use violence to protect their interests in it. Once that economy exists inside a facility, it creates pressure that didn’t exist before: debt, coercion, and territorial disputes among inmates, along with the risk of staff being manipulated or compromised into helping move product. On top of that, inmates under the influence of drugs are more likely to become violent toward staff or toward each other — which is precisely the pattern Mark Gallegos is describing.
National data backs up how deeply drug use is tied to the population moving through the justice system in the first place. Bureau of Justice Statistics research has found that roughly a third of state prisoners and about a quarter of federal prisoners reported being under the influence of drugs at the time of their offense. That’s not a population that stops needing — or seeking — drugs once they’re incarcerated. If anything, the demand inside a facility can be just as strong as it was outside, which is exactly why the supply side matters so much.
And the supply itself has changed in ways that raise the stakes considerably. Fentanyl has transformed what “contraband drugs” even means in a correctional setting. Nationally, deaths involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl climbed from roughly 3,100 in 2013 to nearly 73,000 in 2023 — more than a twenty-three-fold increase in a decade, and for a period, the leading cause of death among American adults under 45. A single fentanyl-laced pill making it past intake isn’t a minor infraction; it’s a potential in-custody fatality, a lawsuit, and a preventable tragedy rolled into one.
Other facilities are seeing the same pattern Sandoval County and Lee County describe. In California, a multi-site contraband interdiction pilot found that millimeter wave body scanners and baggage/parcel X-ray systems together accounted for 89% of all contraband discoveries, with most items entering either through personal effects or hidden on the person. In Maine, Somerset County Jail used a body scanner as an added layer beyond metal detectors and drove contraband incidents down to zero. A jail in Missouri reported a 90% drop in drug contraband after pairing a body scanner with a drug amnesty box. And in Oklahoma, jailers at the Rogers County Sheriff’s Office describe using their scanner the same way Lt. Rivas does — to isolate anyone flagged before contraband, especially fentanyl, ever reaches general population.
The pattern holds across very different facilities, in very different states, using slightly different equipment. Catch contraband at the door, and everything downstream from that door — violence, overdoses, use of force — starts trending in the right direction.
It’s also worth understanding why older screening methods keep falling short, even at facilities that use them diligently. Metal detectors remain the baseline in most facilities because they’re inexpensive and require minimal training — but they were never designed to catch narcotics, and they can’t. Anything non-metallic walks right through. Strip searches close some of that gap, but they depend entirely on visual inspection, which means anything concealed internally is, by definition, invisible to the officer conducting the search. That’s the exact limitation Lt. Rivas points to when he describes what strip searches at Sandoval County could and couldn’t catch. Full-body scanning technology exists specifically to close that remaining gap — identifying both metallic and non-metallic contraband, including items hidden internally, without relying on an officer’s ability to see it.
Why This Matters Beyond the Statistics
It’s tempting to treat numbers like “100 fentanyl pills in one week” or “one use of force last month” as impressive data points and move on. But behind each of those numbers is an officer who didn’t have to respond to a fight, an inmate who didn’t overdose in a cell where help might not arrive in time, and a facility that didn’t have to investigate how a controlled substance ended up in general population. Corrections staff work in an environment where the margin for error is thin and the consequences of a missed search are severe — for inmates and officers alike. Every pill or strip that never makes it past intake is a chain of potential harm that never gets to start.
This is also, fundamentally, a staffing and morale issue. Facilities dealing with chronic contraband problems tend to see more incidents that require intervention, more paperwork, more investigations into how substances got in, and more scrutiny of staff who may have been pressured or compromised. Reducing the volume of contraband reaching housing units doesn’t just protect inmates — it protects the integrity of the staff working those units every day, removing one of the most common avenues for coercion and corruption.
The Understaffing Problem Makes All of This Worse
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Nearly every facility in the country is running with fewer officers than it needs, and that reality changes how much any single incident actually costs a facility — not just in dollars, but in staff hours nobody has to spare.
The scale of the shortage is significant. The number of corrections officers employed by state governments fell 23% between 2012 and 2023, dropping from roughly 236,890 to 181,650 nationwide, even as the workforce continued shrinking further in the years since. By mid-2022, local jails were operating with four inmates for every correctional officer, up from a ratio of three-to-one just two years earlier. Individual states show how severe this has become on the ground: Tennessee’s state prison vacancy rate reached 26.6% in early 2025, Virginia’s corrections vacancy rate hit 18.6% by late 2025 with some regions over 40%, and North Carolina now has roughly one in four state prisons operating with half or more of their correctional officer positions unfilled. The American Correctional Association’s own 2024 survey found security officer vacancy rates as high as 55% at some agencies, with annual turnover reaching 48% in the worst cases.
When a facility is already short-staffed, every contraband-related incident competes for time and attention the facility doesn’t have. A single use-of-force response pulls officers away from their posts, triggers documentation and investigation requirements, and often requires additional staff to respond, secure the area, and process what happened — all on top of the daily workload a short-staffed shift is already struggling to cover. A facility that reduces its use-of-force incidents from “quite a few” per month to one, as Mark Gallegos describes, isn’t just improving safety outcomes. It’s giving already-stretched staff hours back that would otherwise go to incident response, paperwork, and follow-up investigation instead of the rest of the daily operation.
There’s a human cost layered on top of the operational one. Correctional officers already have one of the highest rates of intentional workplace injury of any profession, and research has found that 29% of officers report being seriously injured on the job, with 85% reporting they’ve witnessed a serious injury to a colleague. Chronic exposure to violence and critical incidents takes a measurable toll: one national study of correctional workers found PTSD rates around 27%, and separate research has estimated that roughly 20% of officers experience what researchers call “corrections fatigue” — a pattern of negative personality change and declining health tied directly to repeated exposure to violence on the job. That toll doesn’t stay contained to the individual officer. It’s a documented driver of the turnover and retention crisis facilities are already fighting, which means every prevented incident is also, indirectly, a small deposit back into staff retention and facility culture.
This is the piece that’s easy to overlook when evaluating scanning technology purely as a contraband-detection tool. In an environment where every facility is already asking too few officers to do too much, anything that reduces the frequency and severity of violent incidents isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a direct reduction in the burden placed on a workforce that’s already stretched past what it was built to handle. Fewer fights to break up. Fewer injuries to treat and document. Fewer investigations into how a substance made it past intake. And for the officers who stay on the job day after day, a measurably safer environment to do it in.
What’s Really at Stake: Beyond the Contraband Itself
It’s easy to think of a body scanner as a tool that stops drugs. What Lt. Rivas and the Lee County team are really describing is a tool that stops everything drugs cause once they’re inside. When contraband is intercepted before intake, facilities are preventing:
**Direct safety outcomes**
– Overdoses and overdose deaths, including fentanyl poisoning of inmates who may not even know what they’ve been given
– Violence and assaults, both inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff
– Use-of-force incidents tied to drug-fueled altercations
– Disciplinary infractions and facility lockdowns
**Facility economy and control**
– The internal black market that drives gang activity and violence
– Debt, extortion, and coercion built around drug distribution in housing units
– Staff manipulation and corruption, as outside contacts pressure compromised employees to keep supply moving
**Health and medical impact**
– Secondary exposure risks to staff and other inmates handling unknown substances
– Medical emergencies and the resulting response costs — Narcan administration, ER transfers, and follow-up care
– Relapse and interrupted recovery for inmates trying to get clean while incarcerated
**Operational and legal exposure**
– Invasive strip searches, which scanning technology significantly reduces the need for
– Liability and litigation risk tied to in-custody deaths or injuries
– Erosion of rehabilitative programming, since active drug use undermines treatment efforts already in place
**The deterrence effect**
– Perhaps most notably, the behavior change both officers describe: repeat offenders self-disclosing or discarding contraband before they’re even scanned, because they already know detection is close to certain
That last point deserves its own emphasis. A scanner doesn’t just catch contraband — a consistently enforced scanning policy changes the math for the people trying to bring it in. Once inmates understand that the scan is not optional and the equipment reliably works, the smartest move becomes not trying at all.
What’s Really at Stake: Beyond the Contraband Itself
Two facilities. Two different states. Two officers who’ve never coordinated their answers, describing the same outcome from two different angles. Lt. Rivas talks about closing the blind spot that strip searches always had, and about repeat offenders adjusting their behavior once they understand what the scanner can see. Mark Gallegos talks about the sheer volume intercepted in a single week, and about a use-of-force trend that dropped once the drug supply dried up. Put those two accounts together and the message is hard to miss: reducing what gets into a facility reduces what happens inside it.
This isn’t a marginal improvement measured in confiscated pills. It’s a shift in the underlying safety of a facility — fewer overdoses, fewer violent incidents, fewer compromised staff, and fewer inmates whose recovery gets derailed by what’s circulating around them. For administrators weighing whether scanning technology is worth the investment, the answer from the people running facilities with one already in place is consistent and direct: it works, and it keeps working long after the first scan.
If your facility is still relying on strip searches and metal detectors alone, the gap Lt. Rivas describes — the part of the body a pat-down simply can’t see — is still open. APIC Solutions works with correctional facilities to design, install, and support body scanning systems built for exactly this challenge. Reach out to our team to talk through what a scanner could mean for your facility’s contraband numbers, your use-of-force trends, and ultimately, the safety of everyone inside your walls. APIC Solutions can help you save lives.