This article discusses the risk of work release prisoners smuggling contraband cell phones into prison when they return to the jail. It is widely known that many work release prisoners purchase cell phones and hide them outside the jail as well. They grab them when they leave in the morning and return them to their hiding spot on the way back to jail in the evening.

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.

It’s all in a day served for inmates at Augusta’s Richmond County Correctional Institution (RCCI), working outside the prison. But, that means RCCI has its worked cut out to prevent inmates from bringing stuff back inside.

“We go to every length to make sure the inmates, when they go out to work and they come back, they don’t bring anything with them,” says Warden Evan Joseph.

More than 90 percent of RCCI’s 215 inmates work details, and working outside puts inmates in possible contact with members of the public, who could provide items to sneak into prison.

And, there’s one item RCCI works overtime to keep out…

“Cell phones…it’s not just unique here, it’s a statewide issue. Even the Feds have this problem,” says Warden Joseph.

“Anything that causes a problem, I think, would be a problem. Cell phones are…I don’t think they should have them,” says Catherine Perez, of Augusta, when asked about prisons keeping phones out.

“Because, who knows who they are calling on those cell phones, and what kind of plans they are making, and such,” says Coral Blandin, understanding the problem.

Warden Joseph won’t say exactly how many phones are found every year, but in December, 5 were confiscated at RCCI, and that’s with metal detectors and strip searches.

So, how do these phones get in?

“I can’t give you all the specifics, let’s just say certain cavities has been the primary means of getting it in,” Warden Joseph said.

“I wasn’t aware of that, I think, that’s disgusting,” said Donavon Cherry.

“That’s just horrible, that’s disgusting,” added Blandin.

It’s also a felony. Georgia state law says its one to five years for an inmate to have a cell phone and it’s also a felony for someone to provide a cell phone to an inmate.

Also, an RCCI inmate with a phone gets a date with Captain Lance Peebles. The Security Chief gets the call when an inmate back from detail sets off the metal detector.

“Because we know there’s something inside him, and he’s sitting naked, we know he’s got something in him. He has a choice…either work with me and give it to me then, or we send him to medical where it will be removed, or I’ll go get it and I got big hands,” says the Security Chief, holding up his large right hand.

Warden Joseph says this is not about keeping inmates from talking to their families, it’s about preventing inmates from being able to attempt other crimes like escape

“It’s a public safety issue, not only is the public at risk, but staff, other inmates,” said Joseph.

Monday, RCCI inmate Charles Moore got away from a work detail at a city cemetery. Warden Joseph says a cell phone played a role in the escape.

Moore was captured hundreds of miles away.

That’s why prison’s want them out…no ifs, ands, or buts.

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As we have written about before, wireless airtime and contraband cell phones have become the new prison currency. According to this article, smuggled cell phones in Ohio prisons are “a commodity inside our system,” used to sell and barter, and for personal use, said Vinko Kucinic, the corrections department’s chief security-threat investigator. Gangs, he said, are “power-based. If they can control the contraband trade, they have power.” A cellphone costing $25 on the street can fetch $500-$700 on the prison black market. One way to reduce the value of wireless airtime as prison currency is to co-opt the non-criminal usage by supplying the secure prison cell phone solution offered by meshDETECT.

Illegal drugs, weapons, tobacco and cellphones are flooding Ohio’s prisons, spurring a new wave of violence as rival gangs battle for control of the black market.

The frequency of violent disturbances has doubled since 2008, leading Ohio’s top prison official to launch a study about whether a March 2009 tobacco ban is stirring the trouble.

“Tobacco has become a currency that’s used in our prisons,” Director Gary Mohr of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said.

Ohio’s prisons house more than 50,000 inmates and will cost taxpayers $1.57 billion in fiscal year 2012. Contraband has long been a problem in the prisons, with inmates gaining access to it through the mail, visitors and corrupt prison employees.

But Mohr said something new is happening: People in the outside world have become much bolder about throwing packages of contraband over perimeter fences, where inmates on work details can pick them up. Mohr said that’s especially true at prisons like Dayton Correctional Institution and Allen Correctional in Lima, where prison grounds abut areas accessible to the public.

“All over this country, facilities are being assaulted, almost, by outside people,” he said. “It’s a battle that didn’t exist in the past, certainly (not) to the degree we have it now.”

The ban on tobacco created a new black market, while a younger crop of tech-savvy inmates is also fueling an increasing trade in cellphones and accessories.

Officials say convicts are using smuggled cellphones to continue running outside-world criminal activity from inside prison walls and to coordinate more contraband drops.

That contraband is sparking prison-gang violence, officials say. “It’s a commodity inside our system,” used to sell and barter, and for personal use, said Vinko Kucinic, the corrections department’s chief security-threat investigator. Gangs, he said, are “power-based. If they can control the contraband trade, they have power.”

Mohr, a former Ohio prison official who worked in private-sector prisons for years, said he was “made sick” by the increase in violence he noticed after returning as director in January 2011.

“I could not fathom what was going on in our system,” he said.

The director has ordered his research department to investigate the causes of disturbances involving four inmates or more to see how many are linked to the illicit tobacco trade. He expects results in three or four weeks.

The frequency of those disturbances has jumped on average from one every 28 days in 2008 to one every 14 days in 2010, the first full year after the March 2009 ban, Mohr said. The policy was imposed by Mohr’s predecessor, Terry Collins, in a bid to cut inmate health care costs.

Mohr stopped short of saying he may lift the ban.

“I would have to weigh whether the degree of violence” outweighs the health benefits of outlawing tobacco, he said.

Smuggling even in ‘supermax’

Drug seizures nearly tripled in the first 11 months of 2011 when compared to all of 2008, jumping from 526 to 1,402. The number of confiscated weapons went from 534 to 1,061 and cellphones from 36 to 201, according to department statistics.

Even at the “supermax” Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, ultrasecure home to the state’s most incorrigible convicts, officials confiscated five cellphones and three chargers last year.

A guard under investigation in one of the phone-smuggling incidents resigned in November, said prison system spokeswoman JoEllen Smith.

Officials believe there are several reasons why seizures are up. They say smuggling is on the rise, but guards also are getting better intelligence from inmate tips that’s leading to more confiscations.

Nobody knows, of course, how much contraband goes undetected.

There’s big money involved in contraband smuggling. For example, guards found a 6-pound package of tobacco last week at a prison honor farm.

Mohr said just one hand-rolled cigarette from that package might sell for $5 in the prisons, even though cash itself is contraband.

Tobacco has become “the No. 1 contraband item of choice,” said Mark Stegemoller, chief investigator at Warren Correctional near Lebanon. “It’s very, very profitable. We just removed a staff member a couple months ago who was making a lot of money bringing in tobacco.”

Tobacco smuggling isn’t illegal, however, so smugglers can’t be criminally charged.

Cellphones are more valuable still. Stegemoller said a cellphone costing $25 on the street can fetch $500-$700 on the prison black market.

Warren and Allen Correctional have recently acquired police dogs trained to sniff out tobacco and cellphones as well as illegal drugs in a pilot program that could expand to other state prisons. It is illegal to convey cellphones into Ohio prisons.

Prison officials in Ohio and elsewhere say cellphone smuggling presents a serious threat because the phones allow inmates to orchestrate crimes outside prison gates, plot escapes and uprisings, intimidate witnesses, public officials and crime victims, and make plans for more smuggling.

They can speak freely on cellphones, while their conversations on prison phone systems are monitored.

“A cellphone is a very dangerous thing in our system,” Kucinic said. “Many times, they can be more dangerous than a shank.”

Illegal cellphones a U.S. epidemic

Cellphone smuggling is reaching epidemic proportions in prisons across the country, and at least one murder was ordered from inside jailhouse walls.

Last year, a New Jersey inmate was sentenced to 14 more years for using a smuggled phone to run an identity-theft ring targeting big-box retailers, allegedly with the help of seven Cleveland residents, the Plain Dealer reported.

Guards at a Georgia prison last summer found eight cellphones stitched up in the belly of a dead cat that had been thrown over a fence. At another Georgia prison, somebody rolled a basketball containing 50 phones through a hole in a perimeter fence.

Inmates at seven Georgia prisons in 2010 also used smuggled phones to stage a simultaneous strike for better pay and working conditions.

In California, legislative analysts found that corrupt prison employees — who, unlike visitors, don’t have to pass through metal detectors — were the main culprits in smuggling phones. More than 10,000 cellphones were confiscated in California prisons in 2010 and, according to Time magazine, one guard admitted to making more than $100,000 in a single year from phone smuggling. Twice in two years, California prison officials found cellphones in the possession of Charles Manson, the cult leader who plotted the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.

In 2010, a South Carolina prison captain in charge of keeping out contraband was shot and nearly killed at his home, an attack ironically planned by an inmate with a smuggled cellphone.

Texas officials found 14 cellphones on death row inmates after one of them made threatening calls to a state senator in 2008.

And in 2007, a Baltimore jail inmate successfully used a smuggled cellphone to hire a hitman to kill a witness in his upcoming trial.

Ohio prison officials have found cellphones hidden inside items like tennis balls and stick-deodorant containers, tossed onto prison yards, and in camouflaged packages, including one that looked like a rock.

Prison officials have explored technology that could jam the signals of unauthorized cellphones, but such technology is expensive, fallible and may not be permitted under Federal Communications Commission regulations.

Some using dogs,low-tech security

In the absence of high-tech security measures, prisons are trying other measures.

At Warren Correctional, investigator Stegemoller uses Dyna, an 18-month-old Dutch shepherd, to sniff out illicit cellphones and tobacco, as well as marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

Dyna has been working since Nov. 1, homing in on the lithium in cellphone batteries. In a demonstration for Dayton Daily News, Dyna repeatedly and unerringly found cellphones and tobacco Stegemoller hid in a visitation room.

Dyna was purchased, along with a dog for the Lima prison, with a $27,000 grant. Allen Correctional had 117 phones confiscated since 2008, more than one-fourth of the system-wide total of 428.

It’s not clear how effective the dogs will be. Dyna has been responsible for only a handful of seizures so far. However, said Stegemoller: “The dog itself is a deterrent. As soon as I walk into a cellblock (with her), things start flushing and going out the window.”

Operations Deputy Rudy Pringle said during shakedown with the dog around Christmas, inmates “flushed so much stuff, it plugged up our sewage system.”

Prison officials acknowledge it’s a constant struggle to match wits with smugglers. “The prison lifestyle is a hustle,” Kucinic said. “In order to hustle, (inmates) want access to contraband. They’re very creative as to how they get (it) into our system. When you think you’ve got a (smuggling) method figured out, they’ll come up with a new one.”

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We agree that unmonitored contraband cell phones don’t belong in prison cells, but we believe that a secure prison cell phone solution such as meshDETECT can not only reduce the demand for smuggled cell phones but also enhance safety, decrease recidivism and increase prison revenues.

Download our whitepaper “Reducing the Demand for Contraband Cell Phones in Correctional Facilities” to learn more.

Sarah Pender orchestrated her escape from Rockville Correctional Facility in 2008 using contraband cellphones and a network of accomplices.

Pender, who was featured as one of “America’s Most Wanted’s” Top Ten Fugitives before her capture, showed state prison officials the danger of prisoners using technology behind bars.

Todd Tappy, deputy chief of internal affairs in the Indiana Department of Correction, said cellphones rival weapons as a top threat to safety in Indiana’s prisons.

Prisoners have used cellphones to traffic drugs and tobacco, organize assaults, intimidate witnesses and victims, order people killed or coordinate escapes — as Pender did. Unlike calls made through the prison system, prison officials can’t monitor inmates’ cellphone calls.

“We have serious concerns about their introduction into any of our facilities,” said Traci Billingsley, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons.

More than 1,760 cellphones were confiscated from Indiana state prisons in 2010, Department of Correction data show. The Bureau of Prisons confiscated more than 3,600 cellphones nationwide last year from its federal prisons.

Illinois prison officials, on the other hand, confiscated only five cellphones in 2010, data provided by the Illinois Department of Corrections show.

Stacey Solano, communications manager for the Illinois Department of Corrections, said she couldn’t explain the difference. She said Illinois’ numbers might be so low because of officials’ vigilance in searching prisoners, staff and visitors.

“We do everything we can within our power to make sure cellphones and other contraband don’t make it into our facilities,” Solano said.

The proliferation of cellphones in prisons can have dire consequences.

In South Carolina, an off-duty prison official was shot six times in the chest and stomach last year in his home. He survived the attack, which was ordered by an inmate using a smuggled cellphone.

A New Jersey inmate used a contraband cellphone last year to order the slaying of his former girlfriend in retaliation for her initial cooperation in a police investigation about him.

In Tennessee, a Nashville police officer was shot in 2009 by a man who had escaped from a Mississippi prison with the help of a cellphone.

Tappy said Indiana prisoners buy cellphones for anywhere from $400 to more than $1,000 — depending on the difficulty of getting them into a facility.

Indiana prison officials search prisoners cells, use metal detectors and conduct more thorough searches of their own staff, contractors, visitors and prisoners. Tappy said Indiana also uses dogs trained specifically to sniff out wireless devices.

“It’s dangerous not only to the offenders but to the public,” Tappy said. “We have to do everything we can to keep (cellphones) out of our facilities.”

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At $1000 per smuggled cell phone, more laws aren’t going to stop the contraband cell phones from being smuggled into jails. Only reducing the value of the contraband cell phone will reduce the efforts to sneak them in for prisoners. meshDETECT provides a secure prison cell phone service that manages and controls the use of cell phones in prison.

Put criminals in prison, and we’re all safer, right? Not so fast. Here’s the problem. Cell phones go for about a $1,000 a pop in prison and keeps the crime biz booming.

Recently, the Center for Investigative Action went to work, with law enforcement, inside the walls of Salinas Valley State Prison to find out how the phones are getting in and why these inmates aren’t getting more than a slap on the wrist, if they’re caught.

Inside the barbed wire and electrical fence, outside A-block in the yard with 1,000 maximum level security inmates.

Soccer, basketball, workouts. This will be the most activity prisoners see all day.

And so far it seems like a calm day.

But Lt. Michael Nilsson says it’s the activity inside inmate cells, usually after dinner, that has them most worried.

“Now they have internet access, you’ve got your smart phone, basically inmates have a laptop computer in their possession,” said Nilsson.

Phone calls are allowed. Those calls are recorded and the inmates every move monitored by this guard, assault rifle in hand.

But after the games are done in the common area, back in their cells they access the outside world with those smart phones.

“They’re setting up facebook accounts, their using twitter, using accounts online,” Nilsson says a lot of gang violence and drug trafficking is orchestrated online.

For prisoners who only have time on their hands, calling up phone directories and checking in on what homies are doing, is a breeze.

And it gets worse, “We have victims of crime contacting us at times, telling us they’ve been contacted by the prison that committed the crime against their family member.”

You heard right. That’s not all, for prison guards keeping peace inside these walls is getting harder because of smartphones, “If we have an inmate in one facility calling an inmate in another facility we could have a problem spread and spread quickly.”

So how do the inmates get their hands on the phones?

When a visitor comes to see an inmate in prison they’ve got to go through a whole screening process themselves, that includes leaving all their belongings behind then going through a metal detector. So, it’s hard for cell phones to even get inside prison in the first place.

The visiting room isn’t any easier to smuggle one in.

“Tables are built lower than the chairs, so they can’t pass things under the table.”

But that doesn’t stop people from trying.

“We find them in packages, we find them in mail…In the binding of books, they’re inside hollowed out pieces of soap…Inside Top Ramen soup bags…This one is covered in tape, it’s something they can hide in their cell, on the bottom side of their bunk,” explained Nilsson.

In fact last year, just this prison confiscated nearly 600 phones, that’s about 50 phones per month.

“We find them outside the institution on institutional property that a family member may drop off in hopes of having someone smuggle them in.”

And who helps do that? Just last August former correctional officer Timothy Rodriguez made big news for when he was sentenced to life for hiring a hitman to kill an ex-girlfriend and smuggling drugs and cell phones to inmates.

“Unfortunately, when 1 or 2 people do something bad and it makes the news, it puts a bad light on all of us. Most of our employees are here to do their job well.”

Taser, is part of the K-9 search team through the Department of Corrections; just recently cell phones were added to the list of things he can find when he goes right into inmate cells, every single day.

The program is new but so far Taser has uncovered 30 cell phones in four months.

So what happens to the inmate who had the phone, or the person who smuggles it?

Right now, they get, “A slap on the wrist at best. Why CA hasn’t done it, given were the largest state and home to the largest problem is beyond me,” said Senator Alex Padilla.

For four years senator Alex Padilla from southern California has been trying to change that.

“Unfortunately, if you’re a visitor caught with cellphone, worst they can do is take it away. If you’re an employee smuggling, worse they can do is fire you, but there are no real consequences today and that has to change,” said Padilla.

Right now, Padilla’s bill is in the senate awaiting vote.

If approved, that slap would change to an inmate getting six month good behavior credits taken away.

And for someone who helps get one in, it would be a misdemeanor with a $5,000 fine.

The question remains, is that tough enough?

We checked with our local lawmakers on the Central Coast and all of them: Assemblymen Luis Alejo and Bill Monning, Senators Anthony Canella and Sam Blakeslee, and Congressman Farr are all supporting the bill and want to see it passed.

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