THE $2 DRUG TEST KEEPING INMATES IN SOLITARY: REASON TRIED OUT THE FIELD TEST KITS USED TO TEST FOR DRUGS IN PRISON. THEY WERE UNRELIABLE AND CONFUSING.

AuthorCiaramella, C.J.

BILLY STEFFEY IS determined not to eat the shot.

Steffey is a former federal inmate, and a "shot" is federal prison slang for a disciplinary infraction--as in, "They gave him a shot." When you can't dodge it, a shot is, like a punch in the mouth, something you have to eat.

According to the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Steffey conspired to smuggle drugs into prison in the form of a sheaf of legal papers laced with an illicit substance. The evidence against Steffey is a string of suspicious emails and two field tests, which you can buy off the internet for about $2 apiece, that came back "presumptive positive" for amphetamines.

Steffey is no longer incarcerated, but he is still trying to fight the BOP for stripping him of good behavior credits and throwing him in solitary confinement for five months based on what he says is an unverified test with a well-established track record of leading to wrongful arrests.

"It appears that the Bureau of Prisons regularly deprives prisoners of good conduct time credit, thereby lengthening their time in prison, based on a testing protocol known for its high rate of error, without even minimal procedures to ensure that the tests are conducted correctly and that questionable test results are subject to confirmation," Steffey's appeal to the 9th Circuit, filed last August, argued.

Incredulous readers may roll their eyes--prisons are full of both drugs and liars--but hundreds of botched cases across the country have raised serious concerns about law enforcement's reliance on these types of test kits. Forensic experts say the tests can't be relied on alone; they're not admissible evidence in court; and the manufacturers explicitly warn that all tests should be sent to crime labs to be verified. New York's prison system suspended the use of similar tests last summer because of such worries. Yet the federal Bureau of Prisons relies solely on such tests to put inmates in solitary confinement, take away good behavior credits that count toward early release, and strip them of visitation rights. Meanwhile, low evidence standards make it just about impossible for federal inmates to challenge the results of these tests in court. Steffey and other formerly incarcerated people say inmates are being jammed up on bad evidence with virtually no avenue for recourse. The BOP did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The issues with these tests have been known for decades and are easily verifiable. Reason bought two packs of field drug tests and got positive results for several common, legal substances. But Steffey says the current system gives correctional officers an easy way to gin up shots against inmates.

"They don't want to hear that, because it's one of their tools that they have in their toolbox to get rid of people without question," he says. "They give them a shot, they send it to [regional headquarters] and say, 'Hey, we got to transfer this guy to a higher-security prison.'"

HOW THE TESTS WORK, AND DON'T

THESE TEST KITS--plastic baggies with small glass vials inside--use basic chemical reactions to produce colors indicating the presence of various compounds. The user puts a small amount of the suspect substance into the baggie, cracks the vials, gently shakes, and watches to see what color results.

The Bureau of Prisons uses drug field tests manufactured by Safariland. Several companies make similar kits, but they all rely on the same underlying chemical reactions.

Heather Harris is an assistant professor of forensic science at Arcadia University who trains future chemists to use these color tests. "Atoms can combine together in groups--we call them functional groups--and these color tests are simply looking for the presence of a particular group," Harris says. "When they find that group, they then proceed to go through a reaction that has a color as its product."

A police officer or prison guard who comes across a suspicious substance could use Safariland's NIK Test A, a general screening test that can turn a variety of colors, to see what the substance might be. If the clear liquid turns orange, then brown, the substance might be methamphetamines or amphetamines. The officer then moves on to NIK Test U, which either turns blue to indicate a presumptive positive result for methamphetamines, or burgundy. A burgundy result on Test U, in conjunction with the orange-brown result in Test A, is considered presumptive positive for amphetamines.

These tests alone aren't admissible evidence in almost any court in the U.S., but they are considered probable cause for a police officer to arrest someone. And in prison, a "positive" field test can be enough to get inmates thrown in solitary confinement and stripped of other privileges.

The advantages of such tests for law enforcement are that they're cheap, they're portable, and they don't require a chemistry degree to use. The disadvantage is that, as simple as the tests are, they're far from immune to user error. The vials can be broken in the wrong order, for example. Colors are subjective. And the compounds that the tests screen for aren't exclusive to the illegal drugs the tests are supposed to indicate.

"A methamphetamine test might be targeting a functional group that is present on methamphetamine," Harris says. "That functional group, however, is not specific to methamphetamine. It's common in the world, so there's a variety of substances--some of which we know, but some of which we don't know--that are going to possess this group and allow this color test to produce a color."

Harris says the over-the-counter cold medicine Benadryl can produce positive results in field tests for several types of illicit drugs. And the list of known substances that can trigger a positive result in these tests is ever-expanding. Last year in Georgia, a college football quarterback was arrested after bird poop on his car tested presumptive positive for cocaine.

Reason bought packs of both NIK Test A and NIK Test U to experiment with. They can be easily purchased online, and they're simple to use. Yet the results are up for interpretation.

A small piece of rosemary turned NIK Test A a light yellow-brown color, which could pass as a presumptive positive result if one really wanted it to. Coffee grounds also turned the solution in NIK Test A a dark brown, although it was...

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