The Justice Department will require Federal Bureau of Prison halfway houses to boost services for inmates prior to release. The new rules also instruct federal work release facilities to provide cell phone access in order to help inmates seek employment opportunities.

Once fully implemented, these services will be available to every single one of the approximately 30,000 inmates who are released through halfway houses each year.

Several other modifications are being made to the standard contracts that apply to federal halfway houses in order to provide greater support to returning citizens. Examples include requiring halfway houses to provide public transportation vouchers or transportation assistance to help residents secure employment, requiring all federal halfway houses to allow residents to have cell phones to facilitate communication with potential employers and family, and improving and expanding home confinement by increasing the use of GPS monitoring.

According to the new requirements, not just any cell phones will be allowed for use. Specifically the cell phones provided to halfway house prisoners must meet the following criteria:

• Contractors managing the halfway houses must develop policy and procedures to monitor use of the devices.

• The cell phone can be equipped with GPS to account for inmate location.

• No resident-to-resident phone calls will be allowed.

• Cell phones will be randomly searched, with all cell phones being searched at least monthly.

• Cell phone photos inside the facility or on the facility property will be prohibited.

We applaud this move by the Justice Department to reduce recidivism and increase communication between prisoners and their families. We look forward to working with halfway house contractors who must develop and implement the policy and procedures that allow for the routine use and monitoring of cell phones. Per the new requirements, these procedures must be approved at the time of submission of the technical proposal, and any revisions must be approved by the RRM.

Fortunately, the meshDETECT Secure Prison Cell Phone Solution has the all the monitoring, forensic and security requirements contained in BOP RRC Statement of Work (SOW), plus many additional capabilities to insure halfway house detainees have access to all the benefits of wireless technology in a controlled and secure manner.

The post To Fight Recidivism, DOJ Requires BOP To Offer Cell Phones To Prisoners appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) released a report last month on the Federal Bureau Of Prisons mounting overcrowding issues entitled, “Growing Inmate Crowding Negatively Affects Inmates, Staff, and Infrastructure.”

The GAO report excerpts below demonstrate how the introduction of our solution can increase telephone access, reduce prisoner movement while improving morale, and offset the loss or reduction of family visits:

Telephone Access

“The larger number of inmates also limits inmate access to the telephone to call home and computer to e-mail family members and other contacts. For example, at one facility we visited, each housing unit had three telephones for about 156 inmates.”

Clearly the deployment of secure prison cell phones would significantly improve the 1.2% telephone-to-prisoner ratio at this housing unit as well increase call access throughout the overcrowded BOP system.

Prisoner Movement

“BOP has implemented controlled movement for inmates, which is a practice that officials from one of the five states we reviewed also reported using, specifically to deal with crowded conditions. For example, because of crowded conditions, one way that BOP restricts inmates’ movement in high and medium security facilities is by instituting earlier in-cell hours at night for inmates.”

In many cases, prisoner movement is required to allow the detainee access to the wall phones. With a secure prison cell phone, no movement is needed and those detainees who are restricted to their cells for longer hours can now use that time communicating with family and loved ones. This will help reduce frustration with the longer in-cell time.

Visitation

“Crowded visiting rooms make it more difficult for inmates to visit with their families. BOP headquarters officials said the quality of the interaction between an inmate and family can positively affect an inmate’s behavior in prison and aids an inmate’s success when returning to the community. Each BOP facility has visiting space to accommodate the number of inmates that the facility was designed to house and a visitor capacity to enable staff to manage the visitation process. The infrastructure of the facility may not support the increase in visitors as a result of the growth in the prison population. Further, with more inmates, the visitation process requires more staff resources…Limited visiting capacity and the larger numbers of inmates can lead to frustrations for inmates and visitors, such as when visits are shorter or visitors are turned away because there are too many visitors on a particular day.”

Reduced visitation time can be offset with expanded telephone time via a secure prison cell phone. These phones are essentially “wireless prison payphones™”, with all the monitoring, recording an forensic capabilities of the wall phones.

The post BOP Inmate Crowding Study Shines Light On Need For New Approach To Telephone Access appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

This article about contraband cell phones in the West Virginia prison system begins, “The latest iPhone won’t be among the items in any West Virginia prison’s commissary. In fact, no cellphones will be there.”

What’s interesting is that there really is no reason why cell phones shouldn’t be a commissary item. As long as it a secure prison cell phone with all the controls and security offered by the traditional prison wall phones now used in correctional facilities large and small across the country. Is there something inherently more secure about the fact that a jail phone is hung on a wall? In fact, these prison payphones have security issues all their own because they require prisoner movement in order to be accessed.

We agree that contraband cell phones should be banned for all the reasons usually given when this issue is discussed, but as long as a prison-approved cell phone has all the controls, security and forensic capabilities of a prison wall phone, why not offer it in the commissary? Easier and more frequent telephone access means more revenue for the prison and more connection to families for the prisoners.

The latest iPhone won’t be among the items in any West Virginia prison’s commissary.

In fact, no cellphones will be there.

It is illegal for West Virginia inmates — from those in local jails to federal lockup — to possess a cellphone. That means no texting, no snapping casual photos from the prison gym and no Angry Birds. Wardens also nix Internet access, although federal inmates have access to an email system they can use to message people who have approved the contact. But that doesn’t mean inmates don’t find ways around the warden’s rules. An inmate at FCI Morgantown will spend another three months behind bars for having a cellphone inside the Green Bag Road correctional facility.

Daniel Johnson, 21, pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited object and was sentenced before U.S. Magistrate Judge John Kaull earlier this month, according to a press release from U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld.

The state Division of Corrections (DOC) seized 16 cellphones from inmates in 2011, officials said. The same year, 3,684 cellphones were confiscated in federal prisons across the country, according to news reports. Figures were not available on the number of cellphones seized at local federal correctional facilities, but, according to U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld’s office, nine federal inmates in West Virginia were charged with cellphone possession in 2011.

Any state inmate caught with a cellphone or other communication device can be convicted of a felony and made to serve one to five years in prison or, in the judge’s discretion, up to one year in jail, per state code.

Anyone who provides a cellphone to a state inmate can be convicted of a misdemeanor and made to serve up to one year in jail.

Smuggling a cellphone into a federal correctional facility or being a federal inmate in possession of a cellphone is punishable by up to one year in prison, according the U.S. Attorney’s office.

State Regional Jail Authority officials said they didn’t catch a single inmate with a cellphone last year.

Despite national news reports that inmates are using smartphones to access the Internet and harass their victims via social networking sites, state officials say they haven’t heard of any inmates doing that here.

Chris Burke, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), said most inmates just want cellphones to communicate with the outside world without prison officials knowing what they’re talking about. Calls made from prison and jail phones are monitored.

“If an inmate gets a smartphone or a cellphone inside the institution, usually they won’t be using the phone to harass victims or the community,” Burke explained. “They want to keep it as quiet as possible. By harassing someone, obviously, that person will go to the authorities and we’ll find (the phone).”

Cellphone smuggling hasn’t become much of a problem in West Virginia’s jails and prisons because of poor cell service.

“The West Virginia Division of Corrections does not seize a lot of cellphones in comparison to states with more urban and suburban areas with greater cellular signal coverage,” a DOC statement said. “This may change in some areas of the state as cellular coverage improves. However, certain areas of the state in which we have correctional facilities are somewhat remote and others are located in areas which fall within federal ‘quiet zones’ and, in these areas, we would not anticipate any increases in the foreseeable future.”

Federal regulations restrict cellphone and radio signals in the area around the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank to minimize interference with satellites, according to the observatory.

Inmates at regional jails and state prisons also have no Internet access. Federal inmates can only use an approved email system.

“It would do nothing but cause problems,” Regional Jail Authority Chief of Operation John Lopez said.

Source

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According to this article, the GAO has just released a study on the use of contraband cell phones in federal prisons. However the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) has not put in place or developed evaluation plans to measure the effectiveness of new technologies to address the smuggled cell phone problem.

Update (4/14): The DOJ just announced that it will require Federal Bureau of Prison halfway houses to boost services for inmates prior to release. The new rules also instruct federal work release facilities to provide cell phone access in order to help inmates seek employment opportunities.

Over the last three years, the number of contraband cell phones seized in federal prisons and minimum-security facilities has quadrupled, according to a report issued by the General Accountability Office.

Corrections officials have been alarmed by the trend because prisoners can make unmonitored calls and can continue criminal activities while behind bars. The Bureau of Prisons needs to do a better job of evaluating technologies to detect the phones, the report says.

In 2008, 1,774 cell phones were seized. By the end of 2010 that number had skyrocketed to 8,656. The report looked at the issue in federal prisons as well as institutions in eight states. The numbers were not complete for all the states, but in California 900 phones were discovered in 2007 and a whopping 10,700 were found in 2010.

Authorities told the GAO that “a combination of easier access to cheaper cell phones, better awareness by staff conducting contraband searches and better collection of intelligence have all contributed to these increases, but it is difficult to determine how much each factor has resulted in increased cell phone confiscations.”

Prison officials have been trying out new technologies to detect inmates using cellular devices. But the report says the Bureau of Prisons “has not developed evaluation plans to measure the effectiveness of these tests.” The GAO also said the Bureau should share more information with state prison officials about promising technologies.

The report was completed in July but an edited version was not made available to the public until Tuesday. Details about how inmates manage to get the phones and the technologies used to detect them were taken out. But the document does say the Bureau of Prisons has tried out a radio frequency sensor system in two institutions. The sensors show when a cell phone is being used and shows the approximate location of the phone on a computer screen.

CTIA-the Wireless Association issued a statement saying the GAO did not recommend jamming cell phone signals, an action the group opposes. GAO official David Maurer said GAO was not asked to assess any particular technology for countering cell phone use by prisoners.

In federal prisons, more than three-quarters of the phones were seized in minimum-security prison camps rather than facilities housing more dangerous inmates.

But when dangerous inmates had access to phones, the consequences often were grave. The report says in 2007 an inmate at a Maryland detention center ordered the murder of a witness to his crimes using a contraband phone. In another instance from 2008, a death row inmate in a Texas state prison used a cell phone to threaten a state senator and his family.

Some inmates run illegal businesses to make money. The GAO report says in January 2011 an inmate at a federal prison was sentenced to an additional 14 years in prison for operating an identity theft ring with the crucial help of a cell phone.

The GAO report also provides details on the costs prisoners typically pay to make sanctioned phone calls to family and friends. The GAO says “some prison advocates believe that inmates are increasingly using contraband phones because of the rates correctional institutions charge for telephone service.”

However, the GAO says being able to make calls that aren’t monitored by prison officials allows inmates to engage in crime.

Source

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