If prisoners can have access to MP3 players, video games, email, and cable TV, why not cell phones? After all, contraband cell phones are a huge problem. In California alone, over 15,000 smuggled cell phones were confiscated from prisoners in 2011.

Clearly, there is a demand for more communication by prisoners. Why not provide them a secure prison cell phone solution that maintains all the security and forensic capabilities of prison pay phones? Access to convenient and private communications with family and friends via a cell phone will be a compelling reason to behave, lest the privilege be revoked.

If California’s prisons chief had his way, well-behaved inmates would have access to music, video games and cable television.

Corrections Secretary Matt Cate told a group of journalists this week in New York City, where he was speaking on a panel at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, that state prisons have become so punitive there is “very little benefit in obeying the rules.”

“If you take everything away from a person, you also take away their ability to influence their behavior,” he said. “I think, ultimately, I’d like to get to a place where 95 percent of our prisons are places where inmates have everything from MP3 players to Xbox to cable TV, I don’t care, they can have (all the) goodies you can possibly get, great, as long as they follow the rules … and our guards are safe.”

Cate, who has been tasked with implementing a court-ordered, 33,000-inmate reduction in the state’s prison population, said overcrowding has made it particularly difficult to work with inmates.

He said the way to loosen the grip gangs have on the inside is to cut drug use, perhaps through more drug testing. “You have got to get a hold of the drug problem… I think the gangs get a lot of power and money and influence from selling drugs in prison. It’s a huge problem,” Cate said.

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