Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day illustrates a method used to smuggle drugs into prison: packing them into a tennis ball and throwing it over the wall. (CBC)

Federal prisons will have nearly three times as many dogs patrolling cells and yards, and more watchtowers, as part of an anti-drug plan outlined Friday by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

Day, in a speech at Kent prison in Agassiz, B.C., east of Vancouver, confirmed that Corrections Canada will receive $120 million over the next five years to try to keep federal penitentiaries drug-free. In its budget in February, the government had already announced $122 million in funding for Corrections Canada "to achieve better public safety results."

"Drugs undermine the success of our rehabilitation programs and increase offender recidivism rates," Day said in a statement.

The anti-drug strategy, detailed in June in a Corrections Canada report, includes such measures as:

• Increasing the number of drug-sniffing dog teams nationwide from 46 to 126.
• Using the dogs in prison cells and yards, as well as at entrances to institutions.
• Subjecting everyone entering a prison, including visitors, to the same search.
• Increasing the number of watchtowers "to reduce the incidence of drugs being thrown over penitentiary walls."
• Creating a national database to track visitors to prisons, in an effort to find suspicious activity.

As well, Corrections Canada will hire 165 new special security officers and administrators over the next five years.

A possible pitfall with heightened anti-drug measures for prison visitors is that innocent people can be wrongfully denied entry. Corrections officers acknowledge that their detecting machines can pick up traces of narcotics on people who have never handled or done drugs. The traces come from paper money in circulation, which sometimes is used to snort cocaine.

The new measures aim to fulfil the recommendations of an independent panel that reported last December on ways to reform the federal prison system, Day said.

The panel highlighted five key areas of concern, including eliminating drugs from Canada's 58 federal prisons. It said about 80 per cent of inmates arrive at prison with a drug problem.

Media reports over the last year have highlighted prison violence related to drug wars, as well as inmate overdose deaths.

The Vancouver Sun newspaper reported earlier this year that smugglers were using kids and even infants to get drugs into prisons. Last year, a dog at a Quebec prison sniffed out a woman and her six-week-old baby who were visiting an incarcerated gang member. Police found 32 grams of heroin on the child.