Newspaper cuttings of children, hand made weapons, illegal drugs, mobile phones and home made booze are among the contraband items confiscated at Inverness Prison in the past five years.
A Freedom of Information request has shown that the amount of items recovered has increased in recent years, with the prison service saying it is getting better at detecting such items.
Back in 2014 there were there 77 items removed. The figure rose to 107 last year and this year there have already been 94 articles taken away.
The property has been confiscated from different areas of the prison, including the exercise yard, A hall, B hall, the library, reception, cells, in mail addressed to prisoners and on prisoners.
Drug paraphernalia such as needles, burnt foil and home made pipes have been found regularly and on occasions a CD player and Wii games console were seized.
Razor blades melted onto the ends of toothbrushes or razors to create weapons were confiscated.
A ripped towel to make a line to pass items between cells was also recovered.
Socks with string attached, tobacco, lighters and cigarette papers are some of the more innocuous sounding pieces of property confiscated.
A spokesman for the Scottish Prison Service said: “Prisoners have a list of property which they use, that will list everything that they are supposed to have in their cell. If something turns up during a routine cell search that is not on the list it gets confiscated. It stops people being bullied out of possessions.
“When a prisoner gets new property it is noted in their ‘articles in use’ list.
“We are quite vigilant about these things. We take the security and health and safety of people who live and work in our prisons very seriously. There are rules and if people have contraband material or material they are not supposed to have, we will take action.
“A lot of people in prison are in prison because they use drugs in the community and unfortunately they want to continue using them in prison. We take great precautions to try and prevent this.
“As we are more successful at finding these items, the number of finds will rise.”
There were no attempts to make legal challenges to get any of the items recorded back.