Agreed, prison guards are about the furthest thing possible from what you see on the CSI shows. It’s kind of a last resort job for people who can’t do anything else. When I visit people in prison I always bring my US Passport for identification because it just totally throws a wrench in the works, requires one or two supervisors to review my document, and 15-45 minutes to figure out how to enter it into the system since the passport number is twice as long as the driver’s license number and doesn’t fit in the usual entry screen. I’m sure it’s the most exciting thing to happen to them that day. Wait thirty days and everything old is new again. Once I ran into a super cop who wanted to know how I drove there and started to unholster his sidearm (obviously assuming that I was driving without a license and he was going to arrest me) but then I told him I took a cab and it just killed him and begrudgingly he waved me through to the next checkpoint. In reality I do drive myself, I just take out my license and leave it in the armrest of my car before I go in - that also blows away the myth of all cops being superhuman lie detectors with Black Widow level knowledge of body language and voice cues.
I've had problems getting into bars with a passport before too, I used one for a while when my ID card was expired and people at the door would just say "Sorry we don't take passports."
Then when you call the group of people you were meeting and say "They won't let me in, finish your drinks and let's head somewhere else" they somehow figure out how passports work.
They were set up for accepting passports, but had to fill out a little paper card instead of using their drivers license scanner. I’d get it if they were busy and had a line out the door but they just didn’t want to be bothered.
Maybe they thought I was pulling out my passport to be a nuisance like the parent comment and would try again with my drivers license when they said no.
Question! Do you do this just to difficult? I mean a passport is obviously a very valid piece of ID but you seem like you are doing this just to be a pain in the ass which says a lot about you as a person.
it's very difficult to inconvenience people in authority without at least some of that inconvenience flowing down to the people they are in authority over.
"This smells to me like a myth spread by prison staff to explain away false positives and/or discourage drug smuggling."
This. There are no super scanners that detect drug reside in prisons or jails. There are occasionally dogs though. Dogs will catch if you handled old school drugs (coke,heroin,etc). If a dog alerts on you - the guards know something is up. But that doesn't mean there is enough evidence on you for an arrest. Often jails/prisons will round up a shift of guards and let the dogs smell around - this catches a few bad guards occasionally. Recently, things have changed. Right now the big issue in jails/prisons is fentanyl - it is difficult to train k9s on fentanyl due to it's handling - and there are not enough k9s or departments that can do it (since it is so dangerous). Good luck finding 25 micrograms in mail or on visitors.
