As we have commented before, we believe that contraband cell phones are a problem of both supply and demand. Due to the demand for cell phones in prison, there is an active and highly lucrative pipeline of supply. Most prison administrations have focused on restricting the supply of contraband cell phones through detection, jamming and search.

For existing jails and prisons where the installation of a hard-wired wall phone is impractical due to cost and infrastructure limitations, a secure prison cell phone solution such as meshDETECT will achieve the same results with no capital outlays.

Inmates at the country’s newest prison will be allowed to use phones and computers in their cells – but with heavy restrictions and monitoring.

Private prison operator Serco, which has a $840 million, 25-year contract to run the new facility at Wiri, says prisoners’ calls to pre-approved numbers will be monitored, and the computers will not have internet access.

Currently all New Zealand prison cells have televisions, but in the new facility those TVs will double as computer screens with a keyboard and mouse.

“They provide basic computer access for prisoners to work on their studies while locked in their cells,” says Serco director of operations Scott McNairn. “Access to this technology imposes the expectation that prisoners will engage in purposeful activities, such as education, in what can often be an unproductive time in other prisons.”

“Computers are an education tool, they’re an education aid,” Corrections Minister Sam Lotu-Iiga told TV3’s The Nation. “They help with building up the skills, building up the education in order for these offenders to go out and get meaningful jobs. We know that’s important.”

As for the phones inside the cells, Mr Lotu-Iiga says they come at “very little cost” to Serco, and will enable prisoners to make regular calls home will help reintegrate them back into society.

“There’s a de-escalation of tension that they’re not lining up behind a public phone in order to use a phone to call their families.”

Mr McNairn says it’s the same system Serco operates in the United Kingdom.

“When Serco introduced this system in UK prisons, it saw significant improvements in prison security, including a marked reduction in attempts to smuggle in mobile phones, a drop in random mandatory drug tests failures, fewer assaults, less bullying and fewer incidents of self-harm.”

Prisoners will only be able to make calls to a list of pre-approved numbers, and will not be able to call one another.

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As we have written before, a trial in a British jail has shown that in-cell telephones reduce contraband cell phone smuggling and recidivism. Now a jail in New Zealand will be installing wall phones in each of the cells of a new prison along with an advanced custodial management system.

For existing jails and prisons where the installation of a hard wired wall phone is impractical due to cost and infrastructure limitations, a secure prison cell phone solution such as meshDETECT will achieve the same results with no capital outlays.

Life on the inside looks comfortable at Mount Eden Corrections Facility, with each cell having a concrete bed, a reading light, shower and toilet and one day, prisoners may even have their own phones.

“If they have phone in their own cells, they can make the calls at a time which suits them which is great,” says Victoria University criminology professor John Pratt.

Shared payphones are the only sanctioned form of communication at present, and fights over access to them are common.

Mount Eden is operated by Serco, which has installed landlines in cells in the UK with positive results.

“Significant improvements in prison security, including a marked reduction in attempts to smuggle mobile phones into the establishment”

“And prisoners could make phone calls in more decent conditions, and the frequency and quality of contact with their families increased,” the company says in a statement.

Serco’s Mount Eden boss agreed to talk to 3 News about how such a scheme would be rolled out here, until Serco Australia stepped in and cancelled the interview, saying there are no immediate plans for phones in cells here.

Serco’s New Zealand boss is the Government, and Corrections Minister Judith Collins isn’t ruling it out.

“Obviously I’d want any, any phone lines to be scrupulously monitored, that’s really important, public safety is to come first and I’d expect to see some very compelling evidence that it assisted rehabilitation before I even think about it,” she says.

Rita Croskery’s son Michael was beaten to death 10 years ago. She says phones in cells would make prison life even more attractive.

“Prisoners are probably better off in prison than have been as people outside. They’ve got all the home comforts, nice warm beds, three meals a day,” she says.

Criminologist John Pratt disagrees.

“The more you can humanise the prisons, the better that is for rehabilitation of the prisoners, which is surely what prison should be all about,” says the professor.

An issue which will polarise public opinion and could sway any decision.

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This article by David Yannetti, describes not only the criminal uses of contraband prison cell phones, but also the potentially positive effects on maintaining family ties via a managed and secure prison cell phone solution:

Recent news reports highlight the challenge prison officials face in dealing with the proliferation of cell phone usage in prison across the nation.

Cell phones are nominally prohibited for prisoners in all state and federal prisons, but they turn up by the thousands, and the problem has been made even more difficult with the advent of Smartphones.

With a Smartphone, prisoners may have full access to the Internet, allowing all forms of activity, from contacting friends and family and shopping to directing attacks on other prisoners and criminal activity outside the prison.

Strikes Organized with the Help of Facebook

In Georgia, the New York Times reported, prisoners organized a strike using cellphones and internet applications like Facebook. The protest was concerned with the lack of pay for their work, bad food and limited visitation policies.

Unlike other protests, the prisoners were able to post up-to-minute reports and follow their coverage in the news media.

Prison officials have struggled to come up with a workable solution to prevent this prisoner access to cellphones. Results have been mixed. In California, 11,000 phones were confiscated in 2010. South Carolina collects 2,000 a year.

Some are smuggled in, but many are literally thrown “over the wall.” They have been kicked in soccer and footballs, shot through “potato guns” and are often thrown in packs camouflaged with grass to make it difficult for guards to discover them laying inside the fence.

Search Everyone?

Can’t everyone be searched? Well, yes, but that costs money. California has estimated that searching all employees and contractors entering the prisons within the state system would cost $20 million. Even limited, random searches are calculated to cost $1.3 million annually.

Jam the Signal?

No, the federal Communication Act of 1934 prohibits jamming of radio frequencies.

The most promising technological solution could be the system introduced in Mississippi. Known as managed access, it allows the system to track every call and text. Cellphones that are not on the approved receive a message saying the device is illegal and are disabled.

California, with largest state prison system, will follow the lead of Mississippi and implement a system of managed access. In Mississippi, the system intercepted over 600,000 calls and texts during the six-month trial period.

But…

While the phones may used for criminal or dangerous behavior, there is an aspect of the issue that shouldn’t be ignored. Cellphones are used by prisoners to communicate with their family. The New York Times article notes that David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “Inmates are more likely to successfully re-enter society if they maintain relationships with friends and families.”

A prisoner named Mike is mentioned in the story as regularly speaking with his son when the boy gets off the school bus and when he goes to bed at night. Prison often has a corrosive affect on family relationships, so developing a way to use cellphones to lessen this effect would be helpful. A managed network could be constructed to permit certain prisoners to have operational cell phones, say, as a reward for good behavior.

As the Justice Center of the Council on State Government reports, 77 percent of state prisoners will be released back to their communities.

While it is important to control cellphone usage to for the safety of prison personnel and other inmates, ignoring the needs of inmates who will be released can only lead to increased recidivism and a return of many to prison, carrying with it the all of associated costs to the states that they can ill afford.

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An interesting overview of the problems smuggled cell phones in prison create in jails throughout the United States. As usual however, the discussion of possible solutions focuses on reducing supply and signal jamming, but offers no consideration of a strategy reducing the DEMAND for contraband cell phones.

By co-opting prisoners’ legitimate desire for more frequent and easier telephone access to family, prisons can reduce the overall demand for contraband cell phones and reduce the incentive to smuggle them into jails. This demand can be met by offering prisoners the meshDETECT secure prison cell phone solution.

Devices behind bars can have deadly results. Jamming could aid in the fight, but bugs need to be worked out.

Guards found the dead tomcat last summer, lying between two fences that separate inmates at Phillips State Prison in Buford from the outside world.

Curiously, the cat’s belly had been stitched together, so suspicious prison officials took a closer look. Inside the animal, they found eight cellphones. Someone had tried to toss the dead feline over both fences, but the throw fell short.

At Hancock State Prison, a basketball filled with 50 cellphones was rolled through a hole in a perimeter fence. A guard at the same prison allegedly tried to smuggle in a phone wrapped in aluminum foil, disguised as a baked potato.

Georgia prison officials say cellphone smuggling is the most pressing problem they face. Cellphones are such a hot commodity inside the walls they’re being confiscated by the thousands.

And officials say the phones are a menace, wreaking havoc inside and outside the cell blocks. Phones are used to coordinate attacks inside the prison walls and are enabling inmates to continue criminal activity outside of prison. They’ve been used to threaten witnesses and coordinate simultaneous protests at multiple prisons.

“They present a clear and present threat, not only to the inmates themselves but to our staff and to the public,” Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens said. “They’re not about calling mom on Thanksgiving. They’re for power, money and gangs. It’s a big business and a tremendous problem.”

Over a one-year period ending in July, corrections officials confiscated more than 8,700 illegal cellphones, Owens said. “And if we’ve confiscated 8,700 cellphones, the question I have is how many have we not been able to seize?”

Behind bars, the cellphones, mostly prepaid, cost $200 to $600 each.

Owens said a jamming device that blocks cellphone signals would allow prison systems to combat the problem. But the Federal Communications Commission has not allowed states to use it, despite a report from the National Institute of Justice that indicates cellphone use is a problem at prisons across the country:

*In Texas, a death row inmate who killed four people used a cellphone to threaten a state senator, prompting a lockdown of the entire prison system.

*In Nevada, a prison dental assistant was convicted of helping an inmate get a cellphone to plan a successful escape.

*In South Carolina, a captain in charge of intercepting prison contraband was shot six times in the chest at his home after an inmate used a cellphone to call an ex-con to carry out the hit.

Even the most dangerous inmates — those who are the most closely monitored — have been caught with cellphones.

While Fulton County courthouse killer Brian Nichols awaited trial in jail, someone smuggled phones to him on two occasions. Nichols, who was later convicted of killing a judge, a deputy and another man in the courthouse rampage, used the phones to plot an escape and send lewd photos of himself to his pen-pal girlfriend.

Last year, California prison officials found a cellphone on notorious mass murderer Charles Manson — the second one found on him in two years.

In Georgia, it is a felony to smuggle a cellphone into prison, with a maximum punishment of five years behind bars. The prison system asks the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to extend sentences by six months for all inmates caught with cellphones.

But the smuggling hasn’t landed only inmates in hot water. Last year, 312 civilians and 59 prison staff members were charged with trying to smuggle contraband inside state prisons, and most cases involved cellphones, Owens said.

Owens, who has overseen the system since 2009, says he has an easy answer when asked what his biggest problem is.

“It’s not our budget, not staffing, not infrastructure, not overcrowding,” he said. “It’s cellphones.”

Before cellphones, inmates could only use prison pay phones, and officials decided who inmates could call, when they could call and how much time they could spend on the phone. The calls were recorded. But inmates say cellphones are much less costly than the expensive collect calls paid for by their families.

On Nov. 28, Gov. Nathan Deal wrote the FCC, asking it to reconsider its position on the use of jamming devices to disrupt cellphone calls in prisons. Deal noted that two recent disturbances at state prisons “only continue to underscore the nationwide epidemic of illegal cellphone usage in prison facilities across the United States.”

The incidents — one at Telfair State Prison, the other at Hancock State Prison — left 15 inmates hospitalized and a guard with a leg injury, Deal wrote. Illegal cellphones were found to be the catalysts behind the two fights, the governor wrote.

Deal said prison officials have investigated a number of technologies to fight cellphone use in prison and are convinced that cellphone “jammers” are the most cost-efficient and timely response.

“Carving out an exception for the use of this technology in prison facilities is sound policy to protect inmates, corrections employees and the public,” he wrote.

The FCC shares Deal’s concerns and is working with prison authorities and others to address the matter, a commission spokesman said. There are concerns, however, that the technology poses a risk of interfering with legal calls outside the prison grounds, including calls to public safety, the spokesman said.

Other states use dogs to sniff out illegal cellphones. At least two states have used a technology that, instead of jamming calls, prevents calls from reaching their destination. But Owens said those methods are too costly. He estimated that “managed access” technology would cost the prison system millions of dollars. Using dogs to find cellphones also would end up being too expensive, he said, because he would have to hire and train dozens of new corrections officers.

Tod Burke, a criminal justice professor at Radford University in Virginia who has studied the issue, said there are legitimate concerns that jamming devices could disable phones used by law enforcement.

“If I’m driving by as a police officer, I’d be concerned whether a jamming device inside a prison is going to jam my own frequency,” Burke said. “But the technology is advancing and can probably be isolated enough so that it’s not going to interfere with phones outside the prison setting. And in rural areas, where many prisons are located, who are you going to interfere with anyway?”

District Attorney Fred Bright said cellphone smuggling is a big problem in his sprawling eight-county circuit, which includes a number of Middle Georgia and east Georgia prisons.

His office prosecutes 40 to 50 cases a year involving inmates, prison workers and visitors, he said. This included an indictment against a guard caught trying to sneak in a cellphone he’d stuffed inside a fish sandwich, Bright said.

The GBI is investigating a cellphone smuggling case at a unspecified prison in Middle Georgia, said the agency’s director, Vernon Keenan. It began as a drug smuggling case but has broadened in scope, he said.

Keenan added that the GBI is often called in when there are assaults inside the prison system and during those investigations agents have learned that cellphones were involved in coordinating the attacks.

One prison inmate recently killed a fellow inmate during an argument over a cellphone, Owens said, declining to give more details because the investigation is ongoing.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta recently convicted Carlos Garcia for using a cellphone smuggled to him inside Valdosta State Prison to transfer $250 from a 93-year-old woman’s credit union account to his inmate account.

The 36-year-old inmate had obtained the victim’s credit union account numbers and PIN number from an accomplice, who had stolen the woman’s wallet while she was shopping in Conyers.

At the time, Garcia was serving a 10-year term for identity theft and fraud convictions in DeKalb County. After transferring the money to his prison account, he tried to steal again from the elderly victim, who had $120,000 in the bank, prosecutors said.

Garcia used his cellphone to make online purchases. But, by that time, law enforcement officials were already onto the scheme and blocked the transactions.

Prosecutors said the inmate was charged with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft after he called the credit union to find out why the charges were not going through.

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This article discusses the problem of illegal prison cell phones in the State of Texas. As with most states, the initial approach to deal with the problem is to try jamming contraband prison cell phones. The cost of this approach has yet to be quantified however.

State corrections officials said Friday that a test of cell phone detection technology at a Southeast Texas prison where an inmate used a contraband phone when he escaped last month has encouraged them to move forward with plans to install the devices around the sprawling system to thwart the illegal activity.

A Coral Springs, Fla.-based business, cellAntenna, recently spent more than two days at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Stiles Unit, outside Beaumont, and showed how its technology could find phones inside the prison, said Rick Thaler, director of the Texas prisons.

“The next step in the process is putting out a request to vendors in the field that offer similar technology so they can put forth their proposal as to their services and what they can provide us,” Thaler said.

There was no immediate cost estimate.

“Part of that is contingent on how many devices you put at a facility,” Thaler said. “The more you put in, the more you can hone in on the particular location or at least a particular building that the phone is used in.”

He said it was realistic to believe the technology could be in place by the end of the year.

“We’re trying to move forward as rapidly as possible with the request,” Thaler said. “Hopefully it’s another tool we’ll have in the near future.”

Illegal cell phone use has been a problem for years now in Texas, which has the nation’s second-largest prison system, and other corrections agencies nationwide. Technology to disrupt phone calls, known as jamming, also is available, but its use is illegal under a 1934 federal law.

The managed access cellAntenna uses, which is legal, “allows them to divert cell phone signals and send them on a detour essentially to a dead end so the calls are not completed,” said Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas criminal justice department.

Livingston last month ordered a demonstration of the technology after 27-year-old convict David Puckett escaped from the Stiles Unit. He was captured five days later in Omaha, Neb. John Moriarty, the agency’s inspector general, said Puckett’s possession of a cell phone behind bars was “a major component of the escape.”

“We did a forensic examination on the phone he was caught with and there were 300-plus calls to a woman who assisted him,” Moriarty said. “It just shows you how the security procedures set up in the prisons are totally circumvented.”

Moriarty and Livingston blamed friends and families and even some employees for smuggling the phones or arranging for drops outside the prison where inmates on work details can retrieve them.

“There’s a host of reasons,” Livingston said. “You really can’t pinpoint one in particular.”

He said comprehensive video surveillance has eased the contraband problem at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston, where a couple years ago an inmate used a smuggled phone to call and threaten a state legislator. Similar video security is being installed at the Stiles Unit.

“We feel once completed, it will make a big difference in the nature of all contraband,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can on a number of fronts to battle this.”

“I think the technology is there to deal with the problem,” Moriarty said. “It depends on how much money you want to spend.”

Texas Department of Criminal Justice Chairman Oliver Bell, at a prison board meeting Friday, called security “the most important core function we have in the agency.”

He said the term “zero tolerance” didn’t allow for exceeding expectations, yet for the agency the only acceptable goal was zero.

“We have people on the other side of walls who have 24-7, 365 — time — to mess us up,” Bell said. “Our job is to stay a couple minutes ahead of them.”

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