This calls into question the viability of using cell phone jammers in prisons to disable smuggled cell phones. At least for those jammers that aren’t salt proof!

Jamming is one of the myriad ways being tested to address the supply of contraband cell phones in prisons around the world. A strategic focus on the demand side of this problem – prisoners’ desire for more communications options while incarcerated – is what is missing from these expensive and impractical technology implementations.

A pinch of salt was all the prisoners of Kannur Central Jail in India needed to wreck a mobile phone jammer worth hundreds of thousands of rupees.

This is just one of the ingenious ways found out by prisoners to freely use mobile phones in various jails of the state.

A section of prisoners of the Kannur jail devised the salt technique after their attempts to damage the jammer by pouring boiling water and urinating on it failed.

“They sought the help of an engineer who was detained in a case,” said a prison official. “As advised by the engineer, prisoners stashed salt they get with their daily meals. Then they formed a human pyramid to helped the engineer reach the jammer to put the salt”.

The engineer placed the salt on the jammer and within a few weeks it became defunct, said the prison official.

Some jailbirds arrange for their friends to throw mobile phones across the wall of the prison after packing them in plastic bags.

In another instance, a prisoner staged a ‘nude protest’ after the jail authorities examined him following suspicion that he was hiding a mobile SIM card in the private areas of his body.

Also, the jammers at the Kannur central prison were recently switched off after the nearby residents complained that it was affecting their mobile communication. No need to say that this delighted the Kannur prisoners.

Prison authorities have now increased their vigil following the seizures of mobile phones and SIM cards in large numbers from various jails across the state.

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Another article highlighting the reality that the problem of contraband cell phones smuggled into prisons is a global one. In this case, Kenya’s largest cellular network service provider, Safaricom, will be installing cell phone jammers in the nation’s prisons. According the article, 70 per cent of phone-related fraud originates from prisons there.

Major prisons in Kenya will be cut off the Safaricom mobile phone network in a bid to curb M-Pesa and SMS fraud.

The Prisons Service and Safaricom have struck a deal to join hands in fighting the crimes that are thought out and executed behind prison walls.

“A high percentage of these (fraudsters) have been from prisons. We must not allow the activities of a small number of people to have an impact on our customers,” Mr Bob Collymore, the Safaricom chief executive, said at the Prisons Service headquarters where the deal was signed.

Lion’s share of market

Mr Collymore said subscribers had lost more than Sh10 million over the last four months to the fraudsters.

He said Safaricom will be investing Sh10 million in the installation of equipment to jam mobile phone networks in the prisons, starting with the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

Statistics by the company, which has 17.3 million subscribers — the lion’s share of the market — show that 70 per cent of phone-related fraud originates from prisons.

According to the Prisons Service, 65 per cent of the phone-related fraud cases over the last four months have originated from Kamiti prison.

It is followed by Nakuru GK Prison with 15 per cent, Meru with 12 per cent, Shimo la Tewa at the Coast with six per cent and Kibos one per cent.

“We have sort of found a solution that will work for the time being,” said Commissioner of Prisons Isaiah Osugo, who lamented that the crimes persist despite frequent searches to rid inmates of mobile phones.

He said the prisoners often get the phones when they are taken to the courts, hospitals and out of the prisons for community work. He said that some inmates even hide them in their private parts.

Mr Osugo said the prisoners are also often assisted by warders, who defy rules forbidding them from having mobile phones within prison cells.

The fraudsters impersonate Safaricom staff and ask their targets to send money to redeem phony prizes, send fake M-Pesa messages and ask for refunds or pretend to offer jobs in the military and police for a bribe.

There are also those who call or send messages alleging they have been sent to kill the target and demand payment to call off their alleged missions.

Source

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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.

Source

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Apparently, contraband cell phones are a problem even in Saudi Arabia. Cell phone jammers are being installed in all the prisons there to eliminate cell phone smuggling

Jeddah: Prison authorities plan to install cell phone jammers in all jails in the Kingdom, an official said

“The move aims to stop attempts by inmates to illegally communicate with outsiders to carry out criminal activities that would be harmful to other inmates,” assistant spokesman of the directorate Capt. Abdullah Nasser Al-Harbi told Arab News on Wednesday.

The directorate is coordinating with the mobile telephone service providers in the Kingdom and the Telecommunication and Information Technology Commission to identify the type of mobile jammers that could be used in jails, he said.

The authorities have to take care that the devices do not interfere with mobile telephone services outside the jails.

The directorate of prisons has already installed the jamming devices in Dammam and Alkhobar’s prisons on a trial basis.

The two jail authorities will submit a report to the directorate on the experiment shortly, Al-Harbi said.

He added that every jail, particularly the large ones, have a telephone cabin for inmates. “With the help of a special card inmates can call their relatives and there is no justification for using cell phones illegally inside the jail premises,” he said.

Source

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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.”

Source

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Another report on the international issue of contraband prison cell phones, this time from India. This prison will up its number of cell phone jammers from 9 to 23 to combat smuggled wireless phones. However 80 cell phone jammers are really needed

Illegal use of mobile phones in Asia’s largest prison requires more than 80 jammers to combat it, yet the prison is equipped with only nine.

This was brought to the notice of Delhi high court by the amicus curiae (friend of the court) appointed by HC in a case where it is monitoring attempts by the administration to prevent use of cellphones inside the jail complex. The amicus also apprised the bench that there were certain jails inside the complex that had absolutely no jammer facilities.

On learning of severe shortage of jammers, a division bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justice Sanjiv Khanna on Wednesday directed the state government to install 23 more by August 15. The government has already sanctioned the purchase and installation of these devices.

Appearing for the state government and Tihar administration, Pawan Sharma had earlier informed the high court that nine jammers were installed and 23 more to be fitted soon.

HC was hearing a matter taken up by it on its own after an unidentified prisoner wrote to a chief metropolitan magistrate (CMM) in 2009 that rampant use of mobiles by inmates was on the rise. The CMM forwarded the same information to HC after conducting initial investigations indicting the prison administration. The high court had then directed the authorities to seize all the phone instruments and install effective jammers immediately.

In the past few years, at least nine mobile phones and 11 SIM cards were found inside Tihar Jail. Mobile phones are included in the articles listed as prohibited to be taken inside prisons.

According to the Prisons Act of 1894, any person found possessing a prohibited item inside the jail is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or fine not exceeding Rs 200 or both.

Source

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This article discusses how as prisons try to block unauthorized cell phone use, companies are developing systems that cost over $1 million to address the problem. This is cost that will be passed on to the taxpayer if prisons adopt this technology. By adopting the meshDETECT secure prison cell phone solution, prisons and taxpayers will avoid this cost and reduce prison cell phone smuggling and the value of contraband prison cell phones.

The Bloods street gang is a known distributor. Charles Manson has had at least two. In April, one was used to start a riot in an Alabama prison. Much to the chagrin of corrections officials nationwide, inmates have discovered the advantages of using mobile phones to coordinate escapes, intimidate witnesses, and order retaliation against other prisoners.

Although there are no nationwide statistics, in California alone more than 10,000 contraband phones were confiscated from inmates in 2010, up from 1,400 in 2007. In Mississippi, authorities grabbed more than 4,000 handsets from prisoners last year, up 43 percent from 2009. “Illegal cell phones are probably the largest public-safety risk prisons are facing nationally,” says Terri McDonald, chief deputy secretary of California’s Corrections and Rehabilitation Dept.

Those worries have spurred nearly a dozen companies to develop electronic devices that jam signals, find phones, or block calls from unapproved numbers. “The only way to eliminate the threat is to physically capture the cell phone from the inmate,” says Terry Bittner, director of security products for ITT Defense & Information Solutions. The McLean (Va.) company makes a device called the Cell Hound that detects phone signals and pinpoints their location within a radius of 21 feet.

Cell phone jammers are already used by prisons in Mexico, France, Australia, and elsewhere. In the U.S., though, phone jamming is illegal (except when done by a federal agency) under a 1934 law that prohibits deliberately interfering with radio signals. A bill that would have allowed prisons to jam cell phone signals was passed by the U.S. Senate in 2009 but died in a House committee. Representative Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) plans to reintroduce a similar measure this spring. “We have the technology to block illegal cell phone calls,” Brady says. “We just need to remove government roadblocks to be able to use it.”

Carriers and wireless industry trade groups oppose prison jamming. They say it would interfere with cell phone communications outside the walls. “In seeking solutions to one problem, we must be careful not to create additional problems that could adversely impact the reliability or dependability of … service,” says Joseph Marx, an AT&T (T) assistant vice-president who works on regulatory issues.

As an alternative, AT&T and others suggest “managed access” technology. Such systems establish a radio-frequency umbrella around a prison that intercepts signals from wireless devices. The system checks each cell phone number to see whether it’s on an approved list. If it’s not, the call is blocked. Since the technology doesn’t interfere with legitimate cell phone calls, it’s not barred by the 1934 law.

Last August the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, 130 miles north of Jackson, installed the first such system in the U.S. So far the technology, by Tecore Networks of Columbia, Md., has blocked more than a million attempted calls and texts by inmates while allowing guards and other approved users to make calls, corrections officials say. The state plans to deploy the system at two more prisons this spring. “I’ve searched high and low and I haven’t seen anything better than managed access to deal with illegal cell phones,” says Christopher Epps, commissioner of the Mississippi Corrections Dept. “This is the future for prisons.”

Following the March escape of an inmate who used a smuggled handset to arrange his getaway, the Texas Criminal Justice Dept. is evaluating both managed-access technology and simpler systems that locate cell phones for its 112 prisons. California corrections officials are testing similar systems at two prisons, and they eventually hope to deploy equipment to combat cell phone use by inmates across the state soon. “We’re seeing interest in our technology from prisons all over the country,” says Howard Melamed, chief executive officer of CellAntenna, a Coral Springs (Fla.) company that makes jammers and managed access systems. The company’s gear is being used in Australia, but CellAntenna has yet to make any sales to U.S. prisons.

A big problem, says Melamed, is paying for such systems. Jammers cost more than $30,000 per building, while managed access runs from $400,000 to more than $1 million for a typical prison. ITT Defense’s Cell Hound detection system ranges from about $20,000 for a small facility to $600,000 for a larger prison.

Some jailers prefer lower-tech solutions. Prisons in more than a half-dozen states search for hidden handsets with dogs that can sniff out the chemicals in phone batteries; in Maryland, as word of the dogs has spread among inmates, cell phone seizures have dropped from 1,600 in 2009 to 1,100 last year. And officials at Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California have confiscated just a dozen or so handsets from inmates since 2006, fewer than any other major prison in the state. Pelican Bay’s remote location, it seems, means the facility suffers from something many outside the walls surely rue: lousy cell phone coverage.

Source

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According to this news article, possession of contraband prison cell phones will be a felony in Alabama prisons and prison cell phone detection technology will be allowed if an Alabama bill passes. Rather than spend state funds on prison cell phone jammers, Alabama should consider a secure prison cell phone solution such as meshDETECT.

A Senate committee today approved a bill that would give the state Department of Corrections new powers to keep cell phones out of the hands of prison inmates.

The bill was approved by the Judiciary Committee in the wake of an inmate uprising at the Holman Correctional Facility on April 5 that was sparked by a dispute over a cell phone, which is considered contraband.

Jeffery Williams, deputy commissioner of governmental relations for the prison system, said the bill would give the agency the authority to contract with a communications company to detect cell phone communications from prisons.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Gerald Allen R-Cottondale, would have elevated possession of a cell phone from a misdemeanor to a Class C felony.

After Chairman Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, expressed concerns over a heightened penalty, Allen agreed to amend the bill to make possession of a cell phone a Class A misdemeanor with a penalty of up to a year in prison and a $6,000 fine.

Williams said the incident at Holman occurred when a correctional officer attempted to take a cell phone away from an inmate.

The incident escalated into a disturbance during which inmates seized control of one wing of the maximum security prison for about four hours. It took a prison system tactical team using tear gas to quell the disturbance.

Williams said that, after the disturbance, the department was informed by Escambia County officials that the county’s 9-1-1 system had been receiving “a huge volume” of calls that were traced back to cell phones in four prisons in the area.

“This is an important piece of legislation that will give us an opportunity to address this issue that’s a huge problem for the Department of Corrections,” he said. “Cell phones are smuggled in our facilities and we believe there is technology out there that will detect these cell phones within the system and disrupt these cell phones.”

Williams said the department already has confiscated 5,000 cell phones.

Source

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