This editorial discusses the three cell phone bills working their way through the California legislature. Certainly making it a misdemeanor to smuggle a cell phone and permitting random monthly searches of prison employees for contraband will help prevent some the contraband wireless phones from making it into prison, but it certainly won’t stop all cell phones in jail.

The question then becomes what strategy is deployed to address the rest of the problem? Expensive and complex cell phone jammers and wireless managed access systems? Perhaps a different approach, one that tackles demand, rather than supply, might be worth investigating?

Amid the last-minute flurry of bills moving through the Legislature to the governor’s desk, three simple measures dealing with cellphones deserve to become law.

Two of them tackle the problem of the phones getting into the hands of state prisoners, some of whom use them to direct criminal enterprises from behind bars.

And the third deals with protecting the content of cellphones from warrantless searches by police.

In December, it came out that mass murderer Charles Manson was sending texts to people outside prison from a cellphone he had hidden under his mattress. And that came after the 2009 revelation that he was using a cellphone to call cronies in six states.

Last month, Facebook agreed to take down pages belonging to prisoners who have been updating their pages since going to prison – through their smartphones, of course.

More than 10,000 cellphones were confiscated from prisoners in 2010, compared to 261 in 2006. In some if not many of those cases, those phones have been smuggled in to prisoners by guards.

Senate Bill 26, by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, would make it a misdemeanor to smuggle a cellphone into a state prison, with penalties of up to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.

S.B. 139 by Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose, would permit random monthly searches of prison employees for contraband.

Both those bills passed the state Senate in June – by identical 39-0 votes – and should be expected to pass the Assembly and go to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk this week.

Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed essentially the same bill by Padilla, saying he did so because the penalties were not strong enough; he wanted violation to constitute a felony. Brown should sign this time – some penalty is a better disincentive than none at all.

The third bill already has been sent to Brown. S.B. 914 by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, would overturn a California Supreme Court decision handed down in January. That ruling, in People v. Gregory Diaz, allows police, when making an arrest, to seize a suspect’s cell phone and conduct a search of messages, phone calls and data sent and received.

S.B. 914 would require police to get a warrant before searching a cell phone or other such communication device. It was approved by a 70-0 vote in the Assembly last month.

California Newspaper Publishers Association sponsored the bill because, under the Diaz decision, police could – without a warrant – search the phone of a reporter arrested while covering a riot, say, looking for unpublished information and confidential sources, which would be a way around the California Shield Law.

As attorney general, Brown supported the Supreme Court decision allowing warrantless searches.

As governor, he should sign S.B. 914, upholding the principle that police must obtain a warrant before searching a citizen’s private communications.

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This is an article on contraband prison cell phones is an interesting analysis of the impact smuggled cell phones have had on the revenue from prison payphones. In a quote from the article, a prisoner states, “The prison system is mad because nobody uses the phones on the wall anymore.” In California, as in other states, there has been a big drop in the number of prison phone calls made as illegal cell phones have become more prevalent. Unlike prison cell phone jammers, the meshDETECT secure cell phone solution has no upfront capital costs and recovers the prison phone call commissions currently being lost via the smuggled cell phones.

Frustrated by the state’s inability to prevent thousands of illicit cellphone calls made by inmates from its prisons, California’s corrections chief is seeking help from an industry that has a big financial interest in his cause.

Prisons Secretary Matthew Cate said he will offer a deal to companies that bid for the next contract to provide phone service for state inmates: Install costly equipment that will block cellphone calls and see profits surge as prisoners use authorized services to connect with the outside world.

“If cellphones are inoperable, the company will make more money,” Cate said in a recent interview.

Prisoners are supposed to use pay phones mounted on the walls of their housing units to call people outside. They are charged collect call rates, and the conversations are recorded and monitored by prison staff. But the proliferation of smuggled cellphones in recent years has reduced use of the authorized phones and the ability to monitor them, and officials say they cannot afford the technology to block cellular signals.

The contract for inmate phone service is up for renewal. Cate wants the winning bidder to pay the estimated $16.5 million to $33 million that it would cost to install “managed access” systems in all 33 state prisons.

In one day earlier this year, a test of the system intercepted more than 4,000 attempts to place calls, send text messages and access the Internet from smuggled cellphones at a single prison, said California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Paul Verke. He would not reveal which prison, citing security concerns.

Use of authorized phones went up by 64% in the days after the test, Verke said.

Dorothy Cukier, an attorney for Global Tel Link, the Alabama company that supplies pay phones and collect call service to California’s prisons, said that “contraband cellphones certainly have had an impact” on the number of calls placed from her company’s phones. The firm “welcomes the opportunity to discuss” Cate’s proposal, she said.

Prisoners’ rights advocates and civil libertarians say Cate’s plan would lead to financial exploitation of inmates and their families, many of whom struggle to pay for daily necessities. A typical 15-minute call from an inmate costs about $2.

“When the prison system gives the phone company a monopoly, they jack up the price,” said Margaret Winter, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national prison project. “What we want to do is encourage more contact. That’s a prime predictor of [inmates’] success in the future.”

Bobby Taylor, who was recently released from Avenal State Prison in Central California, where he served part of a 19-month sentence for drunk driving, said he had a Samsung phone for most of his time there. He stayed out of trouble checking Facebook, following his favorite fishing websites and staying in touch with his 13-year-old daughter, he said.

“The prison system is mad because nobody uses the phones on the wall anymore,” Taylor said.

The state’s take from the pay phone concession was $26 million in 2008, when legislation was passed to bring down the cost of inmates’ calls. The government’s share has been reduced by $6.5 million per year since, prison officials said, and will be reduced further, to $800,000, this year.

Prison officials have been warning legislators that the explosion of smuggled cellphones — guards confiscated 261 devices in 2006 and more than 10,000 in 2010 — poses a public safety threat. Inmates use them to run criminal enterprises from behind bars and arrange assaults on enemies inside. Even the most closely watched inmates have been caught with them. Notorious killer Charles Manson has been caught with two.

Legislators complain that prison employees are the most likely sources of smuggled phones because, unlike visitors who must go through metal detectors, employees are not searched on their way into work.

Taylor said he rarely saw anyone using the wall-mounted pay phones during his sentence at Avenal.

“I think the only time people would use the wall phones,” he said, “was to call their people” on the outside “and get another cellphone.”

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