Fifty bags of heroin.

Authorities confiscated the drugs the day Jose Colon got them.

But 10 times previously, Good told authorities, she easily smuggled drugs into Auburn Correctional Facility.

"My boyfriend Jose Colon arranged with these inmates to have their wives call me and make arrangements for me to meet them and get the drugs," Good later told police. "And I bring [drugs] up to the jail, and I give it to Jose during the visits."

Good's method of bringing drugs into prison - stowing them in balloons hidden in her clothes, then slipping them to her boyfriend during a visit - is one of the most common ways marijuana, cocaine and heroin get smuggled behind bars.

"The normal way that drugs go into the prison is people putting them into balloons and exchanging them in contact visits [during a kiss]," said Robert M. Winn, the former district attorney in Washington County.

"A good sloppy wet kiss could transfer a couple bundles of heroin, no problem," added Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Bruce in Buffalo.

Drugs also get into prison beneath canceled postage stamps, stashed in the folds of large cardboard envelopes and in magazines.

"An inmate was getting a subscription to a magazine from a friend who was sending it up to him. The friend was getting a second copy of the magazine and cutting individual photos from the one magazine and putting heroin in between and gluing the photo onto the same photo," said Steve Cox, assistant district attorney in Oneida County.

In another case, what appeared to be a sealed can of vegetables was actually a can with a removable top filled with drugs. Other times, drugs come stuffed in the soles of shoes and hidden in the hems of pants.

And in candy bars.

"I mailed it to him," Tina L. Stark told authorities in 2002, when explaining how she hid heroin inside Snickers bars she sent to her husband, Rudy, while he was in Attica Correctional Facility.

"Rudy told me how to put the dope in the Snickers bars," she said. "He said get six or 10 Snickers bars, open the package carefully, remove the bar, turn it over, make a small slice, scoop out a small portion with a potato peeler, wrap the dope in plastic Saran Wrap; put it or stuff it inside the candy bar, then cover it up with the candy chocolate residue.

"I didn't think it would work, but it got through a lot of the times."

- Susan Schulman and Lou Michel