Opposition Senator Neville Darrell this week denied claims that he had maligned staff at the Island's prisons when he said that some staff were bringing drugs into the facilities.

But he stood by his comments and urged prison staff "to rid their beloved Prison Service of its bad apples".

Responding to this newspaper's report of prison staff outrage at his comments during the Senate budget debate on Friday, Sen. Darrell said that he fully appreciated and supported the work of the prison staff who work in more difficult and dangerous conditions than in prior years.

A long serving prison officer told this newspaper later that Mr. Darrell's comments were unsubstantiated and had angered his colleagues.

"Ever since I have been in the service there have been rumours but I've never heard of any official cases where an officer has been caught with drugs," he said on condition of anonymity.

"I'm tired of politicians using the Department of Corrections as a political football."

The officer noted that all prison officers have to be ion scanned when they show up for work and urged those with incriminating information about officers to contact the police.

"Most of the officers I know don't want drugs in the prison," he said.

"If this gentleman is one of the majority, the honest Prison Officers, who will have nothing to do with smuggling drugs into the prisons, then I must applaud his stand, and acknowledge the debt society owes him for the difficult and dangerous job he does, as I did when making my original remarks," Sen. Darrell said.

"But it is no secret in this community that there is a minority of Prison Officers - I pray it is only a tiny number of them - who cannot resist the temptation to earn extra money by smuggling drugs to inmates in our Prisons.

The community knows it, the Police know it and, if this gentleman had been willing to tell the truth, I believe he would acknowledge that the Prison Service knows it, too."

Sen. Darrell had called on Government to consider having independent contractors, instead of prison staff, run the prisons' ion scan machines, used to detect drugs.

"We are not going to be able to stop the menace of drugs in our community if we look away from the truth. We must look it right in the eye and have the courage to confront it," he said in yesterday's statement.

"I believe that if this anonymous gentleman and certain other Prison Officers who seem to share his views, were to use the time they spend denying the obvious in a sincere attempt to rid their beloved Prison Service of its bad apples, the problem would disappear very quickly, and they would all earn the respect of a grateful community."