An interesting article about the growth of gangs in prison in Idaho and the increase in smuggled contraband cell phones as a result. Part of the strategy, as in other states such as California, is a legistative initiative to increase the penalty for smuggling cell phones. The article quotes an official, “We want to make it a felony to introduce cellphones within a prison. If they can make calls without going through the monitored phone system, they can coordinate attacks, they can coordinate riots. They can continue to operate as a leader while they’re incarcerated.” The meshDETECT secure cell phone solution monitors all calls made through our cell phones.

Nearly half of the 392 inmates at Idaho’s maximum-security prison last month were identified as gang members. And of the 7,145 total prisoners at the state’s varied prisons and work centers, more than 18 percent — 1,311 — were identified as gang members. That’s up from about 16 percent in May 2010.

“It’s not a drastic increase, but we have definitely seen the numbers go up,” said Deputy Warden Tim Higgins, the Department of Correction’s longtime gang expert. “Every facility has gang members. Men, women, close custody, minimum security.”

Gang-related violence, reportedly on the decline in Canyon County and other communities in recent years, is a growing problem within the prison system.

“Eighty-four percent of all of our violent acts inside the prisons involved one or more gang members,” Higgins said. That statistic comes from a study at the end of 2008, he said, but the trend hasn’t abated.

WORKING TOGETHER

Spread among Idaho’s eight state-run prisons (two more are privately operated) and five community work centers, Higgins and the 27 IDOC investigators who focus on gangs have a lot to handle. And one of their chief challenges is to make sure incarcerated gang leaders can’t maintain their grip on communities from within prison walls.

That can be a daunting task, since those gang leaders have plenty of time and motivation to come up with creative ways to outwit their captors with smuggled cell phones or Facebook pages maintained in their names by friends or family outside prison.

IDOC investigators work closely with local law enforcement agencies to share intelligence and control the flow of information and contraband between inmates and free gang members.

One recent investigation started with intelligence gathered in a prison mailroom and eventually involved 13 agencies, two states and three years. Dubbed Operation Black Magic, it led to state and federal charges last spring against 30 members of the Brown Magic Clica, a gang active in eastern Oregon and Southwest Idaho.

Eight of those arrested were already in prison. The cases are at various stages in the court system.

“It started with a mailroom officer who intercepted a piece of mail about a gang-related hit that was going to happen in Nyssa,” Higgins said.

Investigators contacted local police, who warned the intended victim and worked with IDOC to monitor communication between gang members inside and outside prison. The Treasure Valley METRO Violent Crimes Task Force stepped in and unraveled a web of conspiracy and Clica crime.

UNDER THE RADAR

Prison gang numbers could be significantly higher than investigators know, Higgins said. Many gangs, like Brown Magic, operate in rural areas where law enforcement doesn’t have the manpower to track and document gang members.

Members of those gangs, sent to prison for drug crimes or other offenses, could slip under the prisons’ radar if they don’t sport telltale tattoos or brandish gang signs.

“More than 50 percent of the gang members fall into that category,” Higgins said.

Prison staff trained in the ways of gangs often can identify gang members through their behavior, he said. Even those whose skin advertises a gang affiliation are ultimately judged by their behavior, not their markings, he said.

“We track very closely all evidence of gang affiliation, but we try to avoid labeling people,” he said. “We believe somebody can change.”

INTERMIXING AND ACCOUNTABILITY

The keys to prison gang management and intelligence gathering, Higgins said, are vigilance, accountability and not segregating gang members.

Idaho inmates aren’t sorted by gang affiliation, he said, since that strengthens the cliques and traps those who want to break free.

Instead, he said, inmates are expected to mix whether they’re among rivals or people with no gang background.

And then they’re watched very closely.

“We have absolute zero tolerance,” he said. “If we see three suspected gang members having a meeting, we jump on it.”

Mixing prisoners and holding them accountable for their behavior has worked well in the state-run prisons, he said, but may not be the model in the private Idaho Correctional Center, where Idaho’s biggest problems with gang-related violence occur.

ASSAULTS ABOUND

Run by Corrections Corp. of America, ICC is Idaho’s largest prison, and nearly 19 percent of its 2,000-plus inmates are suspected gang members. The 11-year-old private prison has drawn numerous lawsuits from inmates, and a recent Associated Press investigation showed ICC prisoners are more than twice as likely to be assaulted as those at other Idaho prisons.

Higgins, who was promoted to deputy warden overseeing the state’s contract with private prisons just weeks ago, said ICC has improved its handling of gang violence. One of his primary focuses will be to help them improve more.

The private prison operates under contract with the state and is required to comply with Department of Correction policy on gang management, which is different from the approach in other states where Corrections Corp. runs prisons, he said.

Gang violence is still all too common in the state-run prisons, too, he said, but one positive sign is that gang-related assaults now tend to be less severe because inmates know they’ll be prosecuted if they cause serious injury. That’s especially true at ICC, he said, where the total number of assaults has held fairly steady but the brutality has eased.

“If it’s simple battery, it’s a misdemeanor, but with aggravated battery that’s some hard time, plus gang enhancements,” Higgins said, referring to the additional two years for gang-related crime called for under Idaho’s five-year-old gang enforcement law.

“I wish we could stop it totally, but it’s kind of built into their (gang) culture.”

With the new gang law and concerted investigative effort, Canyon County police and prosecutors have put a dent in once-soaring gang violence statistics. In Caldwell alone, police went from investigating 100 drive-by shootings in one month of 2004 to having about eight total in the past four years.

“We’ve certainly seen less of that than two years ago,” said Ellie Somoza, a deputy prosecutor who’s handled Canyon County gang cases for the past six years. “The felony crimes we’ve filed charges on have all resulted in felony convictions, and most of them have gone to state prison.”

LEGISLATIVE WISH LISTS

With the legislative session approaching, Higgins has two gang-related proposals he hopes will become law this winter. Somoza said her prime legislative objective, which likely will have to wait a year, is changing the law so any juvenile who commits a drive-by shooting would be automatically tried as an adult.

Although the incidents are down appreciably in the past few years, she said, Canyon County has seen far too many instances in which gangs chose underage shooters to spray homes or cars with bullets, on the assumption they won’t face more than a couple of years in juvenile detention.

“There’s nothing more dangerous than a drive-by shooting,” Somoza said. “It’s an absolute disregard for human life. You never know who’s inside and who’ll get hit.”

Underage shooters have proven to be particularly reckless, she said, recalling one Caldwell spree of 11 drive-bys in just a few days. The five juveniles involved chose their targets so casually, she said, that one of the houses they shot up was a rental where “someone just thought they remembered that someone from a rival gang used to live there.”

Higgins’ legislative wish list aims to make it harder for gangs to operate from prison.

One proposed bill, aimed at drying up a key money-making endeavor for prison gangs, would make it a felony to smuggle into prison or possess in prison more than a certain amount — probably 3 ounces — of tobacco.

“A can of Bugler (a brand of roll-your-own tobacco) you could buy for 99 cents on sale is worth $40 inside the prison,” he said. “And the gangs are nearly always in control of any big quantity of tobacco.”

The other law he hopes will pass this winter would fight one of the biggest problems gang investigators face: contraband phones.

“We want to make it a felony to introduce cellphones within a prison,” Higgins said. “If they can make calls without going through the monitored phone system, they can coordinate attacks, they can coordinate riots. They can continue to operate as a leader while they’re incarcerated.

“But right now if we catch them with a cellphone, it’s just a disciplinary offense, and it doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

In the past year, prison staff confiscated 18 cellphones from inmates, and there are likely numerous others they never found. Officials don’t know who smuggled them in or how, he said, but all of the devices found were prepaid phones that are hard to trace to individuals — especially since savvy prisoners conceal the SIM cards separately from the phones.

IDOC has some cellphone detection equipment, including a phone-sniffing dog at the medium-security Idaho State Correctional Institution. Officials hope to add more sophisticated equipment soon.

“It’s a huge deal,” Higgins said. “If we lock someone up in prison, we need to make sure they can’t continue to do business and do harm to the community. If they do, I take great offense at that.”

Source

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An interesting look at prison life in Massachusetts. The article states that there are only three inmate phones for over 800 prisoners. By providing a secure cell phone solution such as meshDETECT, the prison can significantly increase detainee access to their families while limiting the safety risks of the prisoner movement necessary to get the prisoners to the pay phones.

It’s where no one wants to go.

The shower floors are scarred from the blades of sharpened shanks. There are no televisions, radios, or hotpots allowed, and no access to the canteen. Pay phones on wheels are rolled to cells for brief calls, and some prisoners play chess by calling out their moves on separate boards in separate cells, where prisoners are required to spend 23 hours a day.

Pedro Tapia, 30, of Hyde Park, who was serving up to 15 years for armed robbery, was in the segregation unit – or hole – at MCI-Shirley medium-security prison for his third time after being accused of verbally assaulting a staff member.

“Everything is hard about being in here; you have to be mentally strong,” he said while in a cage-like outdoor space for his hour of fresh air. “I read so much that my eyes start to twitch to the point that tears come out.”

Unlike at minimum-security prisons, where inmates have much more freedom and are on a glide path to release, the vast majority of the state’s 11,500 prisoners live in a world bounded by monotony, violence, and strict routines, where barred doors and barbed wire etch the horizon and the purpose is punishment.

My visit to the hole was one stop on a three-day tour of the state’s prison system, including a period during which, with my permission, the state Department of Correction stripped me of my regular clothes and locked me in chains, to let me experience incarceration in a more personal, first-hand personal way. (Everyone interviewed knew I was a journalist.)

Over three days, I saw from an inmate’s perspective the stark difference between the bleak, highly controlled world of medium and maximum security — from which no one has escaped since 1990 — compared to the relative freedom of minimum-security prisons.

Our journey began at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, a former maximum-security prison surrounded by 20-foot-high walls, eight observation towers, and five strands of electrical wire that has become the gateway to prison life in Massachusetts. Most inmates stay in this sprawling 56-year-old facility, which smells like formaldehyde on hot days, for two to four months while awaiting a permanent assignment.

New inmates are strip searched – with every orifice checked – scanned for metal objects and other contraband, fingerprinted, and given starchy gray scrubs, ill-fitting canvas shoes without laces, and a paper bag with essentials, including a dull razor, seven pairs of underwear, and a special pen designed so it can’t be used as a weapon. Any possessions, including their street clothes, are either destroyed or mailed home.

Correction officers and other staff check newbies for gang symbols, conduct medical and psychological evaluations, and advise them that bad behavior could affect whether they are classified to a maximum-security prison or a lower-security facility.

Cedar Junction is far less tense since it became a reception center in 2009 and assaults against other prisoners and staff have dropped more than 50 percent. Still, many of the 800 prisoners — 300 more than it was designed for — are on edge, especially when it’s hot. The food is marginally edible and most live in cramped cells with another prisoner, sharing a toilet and standing for six inmate counts a day.

“The yard is despicable, they don’t allow you anything to cook with, and nobody can get on the phone, because there are only three,” said Keith Cousin, 24, of Dorchester, who was convicted of illegally possessing a gun in June.

As he sat in his cell on a sweltering summer day, he said he was adapting to life behind bars. “It’s a very, very depressing place to be,” he said. “But I understand this isn’t a hotel.”

My department guides told me to remove my street clothes – sparing me the strip search – and don the polyester gray scrubs and shoes, which felt like vices on my feet. Then, they locked my ankles and wrists in double locked cuffs, with my hands linked to a waist chain to limit mobility.

That’s how I dressed for my visit to a holding cell at Cedar Junction, a sallow, fluorescent-lighted space with concrete walls and steel bars, where they served a lunch of what they described as “seafood surprise,” with something that loosely resembled apple pudding in a Styrofoam cup. I could muster only a few nibbles.

Afterward, they escorted me to a waiting transport van, a jaunt that made me appreciate the pain of moving too quickly in ankle cuffs. They locked me in a backseat with little legroom, behind grated windows, with doors that don’t unlock from the inside, and drove us to Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, the maximum-security prison in Shirley.

No one has ever escaped from Souza-Baranowski, the state’s newest prison, which is not surprising, given all the special fences, motion-detection sensors, nine guard towers, and 372 cameras recording 24 hours a day. Just to get inside, we had to go through two separate gates and the driver had to step out of the van to show guards he isn’t being held hostage.

It was there, waiting between the two gates, that the guards decided I should change back to street clothes. Even though everyone had been told that a reporter was in the vehicle, guards were still startled when I climbed out of the van to stretch.

Prisoners are not supposed to exit the vehicle, I learned.

Upon arrival, new inmates must go through another full strip search — inmates have been found hiding razors and paper clips beneath their tongue and cell phones and lighters in their rectum. They are allowed televisions, typewriters, fans, and portable radios, but they all have to be a specially designed see-through, tamper-resistant brand only available through the prison’s canteen.

For better-behaved prisoners, the next step may be a short trip down the hill to MCI-Shirley’s medium-security prison, which like Souza-Baranowski is surrounded by a double ring of tall fences and microwave detection devices.

At orientation, new prisoners learn the rules: Sneakers must be all white to avoid gang colors. Windows of cells can’t be covered. Pictures of families are allowed but naked women aren’t. They have to stand for count four times a day and obey directions from correction officers.

They also learn about the greater number of programs available in medium security: Some prisoners study to be line cooks and others to become barbers. They have more free time, too, to play board games, cards, and rap with other inmates.

In the chow hall, a tinderbox where sitting in the wrong place can be a provocation, there are separate tables where Latin Kings, Boston and Springfield gangs, Muslims, and sex offenders, among others, segregate themselves.

When I arrived with a photographer at the medium-security prison, our presence seemed to be known by every inmate within moments of our arrival. Inmates were eager to talk to us, and we interviewed whomever we chose – aging brothers serving a life sentence for a joint-venture murder, a repentant father of four convicted of dealing drugs, a couple during visiting hours who described how they maintained a relationship through his three decades in prison.

Our escorts refused to allow us to interview just one inmate, a prisoner who said he had been in the same dorm room as Tamik Kirkland, who had escaped from the nearby minimum-security prison a few months before and allegedly shot a man to death. They claimed it was for legal reasons.

Among the inmates we met in medium security was Joseph Labriola, 66, one of the few who succeeded in escaping from a Massachusetts prison. A decade after he was incarcerated for killing a drug dealer in 1973, he spent 93 days on the lam, before the FBI captured him living with a stripper in Nevada.

He impressed upon us the deprivation and danger of life behind bars, the monotony of the constant routine, and the sense that many inmates, despite their anger, appreciated why they were there and the need for their punishment.

But if he could, Labriola insisted, he would run again.

“I would rather be outside that fence and die in a snowstorm than die in this prison warm,” he said.

Author: David Abel
Source

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As we have noted before, the problem of smuggled cell phones in prison is a global one. In a Jakarta prison, cell phone jammmers are being installed to stop drug smuggling. Contraband cell phones and drugs are the two most smuggled items into jails. Apparently, the Jakarta prison authorities believe one is smuggled into prison in order to facilitate the smuggling of the other.

Interestingly however, an inmate is quoted as saying, “Prison authorities could do little to ban the use of cell phones, as the government failed to provide sufficient means of communication, such as public phones, to the thousands of inmates incarcerated across the nation.” As with the use of drugs, contraband cell phones have a demand element as well as a supply element. Only addressing the supply side is short-sighted. Clearly it hasn’t worked in the war on drugs. And we don’t believe it will work in the war on contraband cell phones.

Officials say they will soon complete installation of a cellular phone jamming system at Cipinang Penitentiary in East Jakarta to halt the drug trade inside the maximum-security prison.

“We all know that drug trafficking inside the prison’s walls has been possible due to inmates’ access to devices that enable them to communicate with the outside world,” Law and Human Rights Ministry spokesman Martua Batubara told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

“We’re therefore installing this jamming system to prevent inmates from engaging in the drug business,” Martua said.

“Inmates always find ways to smuggle cellular phones into their cells, so we have to make sure that they are not going to be able to use those phones once the devices are inside the facility,” he added.

The ministry’s corrections directorate and telecommunication company PT Telkom started installing the system, known as the Correctional Telecommunication System (Stepas), in September.

Once active, the system will also affect mobile phones used by prison guards and the staff of the correctional facility.

“The prison guards and staffers will communicate using office phones,” he said.

The system has been designed to prevent interference with the radio system used by state railway operator PT KAI to monitor trains.

In-prison drug trafficking is rampant in the nation’s penal system.

Recently, the National Police’s narcotics division uncovered an international drug ring controlled by an inmate incarcerated in Indonesia’s “Alcatraz”, Nusakambangan Penitentiary, in Cilacap, Central Java.

A former Cipinang inmate who wished to remain anonymous recently told the Post that the prison was effectively a university for drug traffickers, helping small-time and medium-sized dealers improve their skills to become major players in the business.

The inmate also said that a lucrative drug trade took place inside the prison’s cells, involving almost everyone in the facility, including the prison guards, and that the widespread availability of illegal cellular phones made it easy for drug dealers to continue operating.

Prison authorities could do little to ban the use of cell phones, the inmate said, as the government failed to provide sufficient means of communication, such as public phones, to the thousands of inmates incarcerated across the nation.

Separately, University of Indonesia criminologist Adrianus Meliala said the installation of the signal jamming system was a tacit admission by the Law and Human Rights Ministry that it could not maintain discipline within the nation’s penal system.

“The ministry know that some of its prison officials are ‘dirty’ and that the smuggling of cellular phones into correctional facilities is inevitable,” Adrianus said.

“The ministry is trying to add another layer of security by installing the jammers inside the prison compound,” he added.

Adrianus said he doubted that the ministry would be able to consistently uphold its policy on the phone signal jammers.

“This policy is not a new one. This is an old policy that had been implemented earlier. For some reasons, the ministry scrapped the old one and is now trying to revive it,” he said.

The ministry had previously adopted a similar system at Nusakambangan Penitentiary.

The main problem was with the ministry: It came up with a good policy only to subsequently scrap it, he added.

Source

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An article about a prison in Australia highlighting the problem of contraband technology being smuggled into prisons. It is not just contraband prison cell phones which are a problem in this particular facility.

Prisoners in one of Victoria’s most secure jails have been using webcams and wireless internet devices to enjoy freedom on the outside world.

The Herald Sun can reveal two cameras, a wireless USB internet stick and several USBs containing data were found at Barwon Prison.

Police are investigating and several inmates may be charged.

It is the latest in a series of breaches at the maximum-security prison, the most serious being the murder of gangland killer Carl Williams last year.

Correction Victoria’s Security and Emergency Services Group officers seized computers in last month’s search.

The contraband was found in the prison’s Eucalypt unit, which houses murderers such as police killer Jason Roberts.

The Herald Sun has reported Roberts had been taunting his victims online by professing his innocence, and calling on pen pals to write to him.

A Corrections Victoria spokesman said at the time it was believed the websites were being maintained by someone outside jail.

Victorian prisoners are not allowed internet access.

“Prisoners across the Victorian prison system have access to computers in specified and controlled circumstances, which never includes internet access. Computers are subject to regular searches and audits,” the spokesman said.

“Any prisoner found to have used their computer inappropriately will not get it back.

“Corrections Victoria is constantly reviewing its computer policy in light of technological developments such as internet-enabled USB devices.”

The spokesman said security officers made 90,000 searches of prisoners and visitors in the past year.

But resourceful criminals were still been able to smuggle compact computer equipment into jail.

Killer Hugo Rich was found with a stash of cyber porn when his cell was searched late last year.

Loddon Prison in central Victoria was nicknamed Crazy Johns after thee mobile phones and other accessories were seized in March last year.

Two killers were linked to that discovery.

Opposition corrections spokeswoman Jill Hennessy said the State Government had not invested enough in security or guards.

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