The Labour Party this morning accused the government of having 'done nothing' at the prisons despite its repeated warnings on the drugs situation there.

Party home affairs spokesman Michael Falzon said it was criminal to tolerate such a situation and persist in error. He was fed up of a situation where whoever was responsible had known of the alarming situation, but had done nothing.

As stated by Mr Justice Michael Mallia on Thursday, the prisons were not really a correctional facility, he stressed at a press conference.

Dr Falzon recalled that in a speech in Parliament in November 2009, he had likened the prisons to the film Midnight Express. Now one could write a sequel in the light of the Josette Bickle case, he said. It could be called Corradino Express. The difference was that the situation now was worse at Corradino than it was then.

The 8-1 verdict in the Bickle case showed how society was fed up with the situation.

He said that it was unacceptable for Tonio Borg - Home Affairs Minister between 2006 and 2008, to have claimed that he had not been informed of the situation at the prisons, when the PL had been among those drawing attention to it. To say that he was unaware of the situation reflected the government's failures. 

He said that the government was admitting the drugs problem in the prison, so much so that the Reparative Justice Act provided that a prisoner could only be eligible for parole if he completed a rehabilitation programme.

He also noted that according to a report by the  European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, prisoners have not been tested regularly since 2009. The government should explain why such regular testing has stopped, he said.