The website Gizmodo has a interesting article about smuggled cell phones in San Quentin. Its a pretty graphic article as you will see from the excerpt here. You can read the rest of the article here.

According to the article 10% of the population has a contraband cell phone. We believe addressing the demand for contraband cell phones by providing a secure prison cell phone solution should be part of the strategy to reduce contraband cell phone smuggling.

Smart phones are especially coveted in prison, not surprisingly. Aside from being able to more easily email, search the web and communicate, this is arguably the main way prisoners are getting their porn now. Porn, as you might imagine, is a very hot commodity in the big house.

Most of the phones that are discovered are of the pre-paid variety, which makes them extremely hard to trace. Most of the time, when phones are found they are locked and have had their SIM cards removed. In cases where they recover a phone with a SIM card they attempt to unlock it and scour it for data: phone numbers they called, text messages, emails, and any photos they may have taken.

Sergeant McGraw said that while other prisons have a much bigger problem with phones being brought in (especially prisons in more rural areas), he’s noticed a huge jump at San Quentin just within the last year. He estimates that roughly 10-percent of the population in San Quentin have cell phones, which is a stark contradiction to the 1-percent estimate inmate Sam Johnson gave us just an hour earlier.

There are many different ways that phones come in. Officer Patao mentioned the inmate crews that work for Caltrans (the California Department of Transportation). The correctional officers have made it much more difficult for this to work by making sure that inmates have no idea where they’ll be working on any given day. But if they are on a larger, week-long assignment in one area, it still happens. He also talked about drop points within the San Quentin grounds.

Drops can work in a number of ways. For example, there’s a bathroom just outside one of the main San Quentin gates which is open to the public and is a big draw for tourists. Inmate work crews clean these bathrooms every day. An inmate’s associate on the outside will have taped a package (of phones, drugs, tobacco, etc.) to the back of the women’s toilet, for example. When the inmates come to clean, they toss it in with the rest of the trash, then sort through it later. Then, when when nobody’s looking, whoop, up the butt it goes. They are usually prepackaged in latex gloves or condoms for easier insertion. Ow.

Another drop scenario: San Quentin backs up to a main road in San Rafael, with only a chain-link fence separating its grounds from civilization. This is the outside perimeter, not the security perimeter. Inmates’ associates pull over to the side of the road at night and just throw over a distinctive bag such as one from McDonalds, or Burger King. When the work crew comes out in the morning to clean the grounds, they pick the bag up, hide it in the lawnmower bag and then get the contents later.

The last way stuff gets in, though nobody likes talking about it, is that people can be bribed. San Quentin has hundreds of volunteers who come in and out all the time. While the vast majority of them are on the level, there are always people willing to sneak something in for a price. This includes correctional officers as well, though prison officials like talking about that even less.

In all of these scenarios cell phones are used to coordinate these drops, which makes it even more critical for the officers to try to keep them out.

Phones go from $300 to $700. Most of the cash is handled outside of the institution. Usually someone on the street is responsible for smuggling in the phone, and then the inmate who received the phone will have a family member or associate on the outside pay him/her in cash or money order.

Once phones are within the system they are incredibly hard for the correctional officers to get a hold of. Officer Patao says, “It’s harder for our institution because we dont’ have the luxury of having cameras recording everything here, so we have to rely a lot on information we receive from our informants.”

Sergeant McGraw agrees. “In a dorm setting, once our officers hit the yard, there are lookouts. In each unit there are five dorms—they’re tipped off and the phones are gone before we can even enter the dorm. It’s hard to track these phones down and get them while they’re on them, and they’re passed around so much.”

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Despite the many sensationalist press accounts of prisoners using smuggled contraband cell phones to plot crimes or run criminal enterprises from within jail, the vast majority of prison cell phone use is detainees talking to loved ones.

It has been shown that increased communications between detainees and loved ones helps to keep families together during incarceration and reduces recidivism. Incarceration is a strain on all involved, as this article demonstrates, and leads to the smuggling of cell phones in an attempt to keep a marriage intact.

A prisoner who hid a mobile phone up his bottom claimed he was using it in a desperate last-ditch attempt to save his troubled marriage.

Drug dealer Paul Nolan was found with the phone clenched between his buttocks after a period of home leave was granted by Castle Huntly prison.

Nolan, 45, arrived back at the jail after seven days at home with his wife, who told him that she was planning to bring their marriage to an end.

He handed prison officers an iPhone that he claimed he had accidentally brought back with him and was sent to his cell.

However, a short time later a search of his cell was carried out and a second phone was found.

Nolan, who is serving more than six years in jail after a raid on his Cambuslang home netted £300,000 worth of drugs, had secreted the phone in his bottom.

But he was unable to clench his buttocks tight enough to hold it in place and it fell to the ground when he stood up during the search on September 14 this year.

Fiscal depute Carol Whyte told Perth Sheriff Court on Wednesday: “The accused returned from a seven-day period of home leave. He spoke to members of staff and told them he had accidentally brought an iPhone with him.

“A routine search of his cell was then carried out at 9pm. At that time he was lying on his bed. Officers gave him a full search. They spotted a Samsung phone on the ground which fell from his buttocks.”

A charger was also found connected to a games system.

The accused has been moved to HMP Addiewell in West Calder.

Solicitor Linda Clark, defending, said: “He enjoyed privileges in Castle Huntly and part of that was home leave. During his period at home his wife indicated she had initiated divorce proceedings.

“During the seven days he made attempts to try and dissuade her. He surrendered the iPhone when he got back. When he got to his cell an offer was made to him regarding another mobile phone.

“Stupidly, he purchased that solely with the intention of keeping up contact with his wife in the hope he could dissuade her from proceeding with the divorce action.”

Ms Clark told the court that Nolan’s efforts had failed as his wife was carrying on with her divorce bid and she said he accepted he breached the trust placed in him by prison chiefs.

Nolan admitted having an illicit mobile phone in prison and he had a further 20 days added to his sentence.

He had been moved to the low security open prison just over a year ago after being jailed in March 2010 for drug dealing.

Source

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