Scanners that can detect tiny particles of drugs or explosives carried by prison visitors will form the front line of the fight against contraband in Victoria's maximum security jails.
The new $300,000 ion scanner, the first in Victoria and the most modern in Australia, can detect 40 drugs and a further 40 explosive substances.
The first of the scanners went in to service on Thursday at the Melbourne Assessment Prison which is the first port of call for all prisoners entering Victoria's corrections system and therefore the first line of defence for the detection of contraband.
All 21,000 visitors to the Melbourne Assessment Prison each year will be checked by the scanner, which blows jets of air over their clothing and bodies that release particles of any contraband.
The machine examines the airborne particles and provides a result in 10 seconds.
It can screen up to seven people a minute.
As well, new biometric iris scanning technology was introduced to the prison on Christmas Day.
Digital photographs of the coloured parts of the eyes of every prison visitor will be compared with images of their eyes scanned each time they enter and leave the jail.
No two human irises are identical.
Similar iris technology is already in use in NSW and WA.
Corrections Victoria south-east region prisons general manager Trevor Craig said prison officers were already conducting more searches and using new detection equipment to unearth contraband had a valuable new tool.
"This is the best in the world at the present time," Mr Craig said.
"Over the last five or six years our system has made massive inroads to decrease the amount of drugs in our prison system but they still get in, in small quantities.
"Machines like this technology will obviously decrease that even further, thus creating a safer prison system and a prison system that will benefit the community even further."
Police Minister Tim Holding said the ion and iris scanners were a significant boost to prison security at a time when the state's jails held terrorism and underworld suspects.
"We find that people are finding ever more sophisticated ways to bring contraband into prison, so the importance of having technologies like this shouldn't be understated," he said.
"It's very important that these prisons are appropriately secured and that people visiting them are appropriately screened when they come into the prison environment because these people can potentially pose a real risk to prison security, to the security of other prisoners, prison staff and, more generally the Victorian community if they were able to flee prison custody."
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