An aspiring Illawarra barber's dreams of opening his own hairdressing salon with his girlfriend will have to wait at least another four months after he was sentenced to jail time for trying to import the opiate drug buprenorphine into Wellington prison.
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Convicted felon Rian Kinloch had been hoping to avoid a jail sentence over his budding drug supply enterprise, however Magistrate Claire Girotto dashed his hopes on Friday morning, saying no penalty other than full-time prison was appropriate.
"There's clear evidence, which hasn't been disputed, that the purpose of importing the strips was for financial gain," she said, despite Kinloch previously telling the court his primary motive for bringing the drugs into the jail was for self-use.
"My sentence has to call for a great deal of specific and general deterrence in relation to this sort of offence, plus acknowledgement to the harm done to the administration of the jail, as well as the harm done to prisoners inside it."
She sentenced Kinloch to 10 months jail, with a 5-month non-parole period backdated to June, when he was first brought into custody on the offences.
He will be released on parole in November.
Documents tendered to Wollongong Local Court reveal Kinloch stood to make up to $77,000 if he sold all the strips of buprenorphine instead of using some himself.
The court heard Kinloch was in custody in Wellington jail on unrelated charges when he organised for several female associates to send him the drugs during his five and a half-month stay there from November last year.
One of the women subsequently sent an illicit package from Unanderra Post Office to a resident in Dubbo on March 11 at Kinloch's bidding.
The resident was then supposed to visit the prison, with the drugs concealed, to hand them to Kinloch.
But correctional intelligence officers who had been listening in on Kinloch's phone calls overheard him organising the delivery and alerted police, who intercepted the package as it arrived in Dubbo five days later.
Police opened it to find a white Pandora jewellery box. Inside, they found two small bundles of drugs wrapped in multiple water balloons.
Meanwhile, Kinloch was released on bail by the NSW Supreme Court in late April, just days after his co-accused in an unrelated matter, Michael Black, was fatally stabbed inside Parklea prison. Prison intelligence officials held grave fears for Kinloch's safety at the time.
Kinloch was re-arrested on June 12 over the jail drug supply and remanded in custody at South Coast Correctional Centre.
During a previous court appearance, defence lawyer Laura Fennell said Kinloch had worked as a barber at a hairdressers in Thirroul while on bail and he and his girlfriend were thinking about opening their own salon in the future.
She said Kinloch had been drug tested twice daily by police while on bail and had been able to "achieve and maintain a level of sobriety" that had changed his attitude toward drugs and motivated him to get treatment.
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