Correctional officers find eight phones at the CDCR’s Norco facility – one of them was tucked in a shoe. It was originally hidden in a deodorant container in an attempt to throw off the dogs’ scent.

The canines are able to sniff through that. Inmates have tried to mask the scent of their phone with coffee, spices – even peanut butter – but the dogs keep finding their cell phones.

Dogs Trained to Sniff Out Prison Cell Phones

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If prisoners can have access to MP3 players, video games, email, and cable TV, why not cell phones? After all, contraband cell phones are a huge problem. In California alone, over 15,000 smuggled cell phones were confiscated from prisoners in 2011.

Clearly, there is a demand for more communication by prisoners. Why not provide them a secure prison cell phone solution that maintains all the security and forensic capabilities of prison pay phones? Access to convenient and private communications with family and friends via a cell phone will be a compelling reason to behave, lest the privilege be revoked.

If California’s prisons chief had his way, well-behaved inmates would have access to music, video games and cable television.

Corrections Secretary Matt Cate told a group of journalists this week in New York City, where he was speaking on a panel at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, that state prisons have become so punitive there is “very little benefit in obeying the rules.”

“If you take everything away from a person, you also take away their ability to influence their behavior,” he said. “I think, ultimately, I’d like to get to a place where 95 percent of our prisons are places where inmates have everything from MP3 players to Xbox to cable TV, I don’t care, they can have (all the) goodies you can possibly get, great, as long as they follow the rules … and our guards are safe.”

Cate, who has been tasked with implementing a court-ordered, 33,000-inmate reduction in the state’s prison population, said overcrowding has made it particularly difficult to work with inmates.

He said the way to loosen the grip gangs have on the inside is to cut drug use, perhaps through more drug testing. “You have got to get a hold of the drug problem… I think the gangs get a lot of power and money and influence from selling drugs in prison. It’s a huge problem,” Cate said.

Source

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Each of the Wilcox State Prison’s 1,862 inmates were strip searched, then removed from their cells and placed in a holding room. Officers then entered two at a time, sometimes accompanied by a member of the K-9 unit.

By the end of the shakedown, officers had confiscated 32 cell phones, 21 weapons and small amounts of marijuana and meth. Most of the items were well hidden: behind walls, in ceilings or inside of a broken sink.

They said their biggest focus is finding and removing cell phones. Prison warden Robert Toole said they are just as dangerous as weapons.

“Once that one cell phone makes it in, it just opens up the flood gates,” he said. “It allows inmates to communicate, to carry on criminal activity outside the walls. It allows inmates to intimidate possible witnesses.”

Contraband cell phones can be replaced by the meshDETECT secure cell phone solution to reduce the demand for smuggled cell phones and control their use for criminal activity

Source

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A report on the problem of contraband cell phones in prison and the use of Facebook by prisoners while in jail.

Busted! Prison Cell Phones from Scott Noll on Vimeo.

The post Prison Cell Phone Video Report appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

This article is about the challenges and indignities of visiting a loved one in jail. The sheriff in charge of the jail discusses the environment in the visiting room, “There are loads of kids there. And a strong part of me says that’s not a good environment for any child. I don’t want kids seeing this stuff. The other side is, if they’re connecting with their father, that’s a good thing, too. We can’t do it any other way because we have so many visitors, so many prisoners. You want to make it better. I’m struggling how to pull that off.”

Certainly families want and deserve to see their incarcerated love ones. In addition to visitation however, enhanced and more frequent telephone conversations would assist in allowing children of prisoners to connect with their incarcerated parent. Part of the challenge for prisons in allowing access to prison payphones is the safety risk of prisoner movement required to get prisoners to the phones. By deploying the meshDETECT secure prison cell phone solution, prisons can minimize the need for prisoner movement which enhances the safety of both detainees and guards while offering families more frequent and higher quality contact with their incarcerated loved ones.

Every Thursday since the arrest of his son July 30, Neal Tarshis rolls his wheelchair to a bus stop to begin a trek to Cook County Jail.

“I see him as much as they let me,” says Tarshis, over the rumble of the #93 bus. “I want him to know someone cares.”

Tarshis, 63, in a wheelchair because of severe arthritis, lives in Astoria Place, a nursing home at 6300 N. California. It is a two-hour, four-bus commute — the #93 to the #82 to the #126 to the #94 — to get to the jail at 3000 S. California. Once, he says, he made the trip only to find he couldn’t get in to see his son.

“I went with Neal,” said a friend. “They changed visiting hours without notice. They didn’t treat him nice. It was a nightmare.”

Tarshis wrote to me to complain, and since I couldn’t go back in time and observe how he was handled or mishandled at the jail, the thing to do was to go with him and watch.

Some 11,000 prisoners live at the jail, giving it the population of Edison Park. The mayor of the jail, so to speak, is Sheriff Tom Dart, and if you expect him to be defensive about mistreated visitors, you’d be wrong.

“I detest apologists rationalizing bad behavior,” Dart said. “Sometimes there’s elements of truth in both sides. There are times when I scratch my head why we’re not treating someone with more respect who comes to visit.” Dart sympathizes with the 1,000 or so daily visitors, who must pass through tight security for their 15-minute visit.

“These are decent people and we’re not treating them with a red carpet,” the sheriff said. “They’ve gone through hell enough as it is, lives turned upside down by a grandson or a nephew. These are grandparents coming in, aunts and uncles. They’ve done nothing wrong. How does it work for our office to treat people like trash?”

But he also sympathizes with his officers.

“Objectively, I challenge someone to find a more difficult job than being a correctional officer,” he said. “It’s a very, very difficult job. Can the public be unreasonable? Yes. Can the correctional officer? Yes. But we’ve tried to be much more customer-friendly.”

Two hours is a long time on buses, and Tarshis reminisces about his son, a Navy vet.

“I have so many memories of when he was little,” said Tarshis. “He was very intelligent, very responsible. He got A’s in all his subjects. He’s not a bad child, he’s sweet.”

His son, 36, has too many problems to summarize here. Suffice it to say this is his third time in jail, not for a grave crime — he didn’t kill anybody — and I’m not using his name to make it easier if he pulls himself together.

Tarshis and I join a long line outside the tall concertina wire-topped fence around the jail. The guards take us five at a time, ordering us to have our IDs ready, reminding us that we cannot bring in cell phones or pens.

Once, visitors were told to bury their contraband in the bushes outside. Now Dart has been installing vending machine lockers.

We go through metal detectors and are frisked by guards; their manner is severe but not rude and I get the impression that so long as you immediately do exactly what they say it goes smoothly, but that any hesitation or resistance might invite rougher treatment.

We give our names, wait more, then are ushered into a long room, 15 at a time, with stools bolted to the floor. Fifteen prisoners in sand-colored jail garb emerge on the other side of the Plexiglas. It’s loud and hard to hear. The jail used to use phones, but those were destroyed by angry inmates and visitors. Now there is a round red metal plate, the holes staggered to keep drinking straws filled with cocaine from being pushed through.

His son, gaunt, his head closely sheared, is all jangly intensity — I expected to watch him and his dad talk, but he wants to talk to me, a compressed stream of complaint and indignation about the jail. Next to us, a mother puts a toddler on the counter and the girl presses her hands flat against the glass.

That’s another issue Dart grapples with — there can be a child at one spot, a profanity-laced tirade at the next, and a woman holding up her shirt to flash her breasts at a third.

“There are loads of kids there,” said Dart, proud father of five kids. “And a strong part of me says that’s not a good environment for any child. I don’t want kids seeing this stuff. The other side is, if they’re connecting with their father, that’s a good thing, too. We can’t do it any other way because we have so many visitors, so many prisoners. You want to make it better. I’m struggling how to pull that off.”

Dart would like remote video visits, to save families the trip, but “there’s no money.”

The next court date for Neal Tarshis’s son is Nov. 2, which means one thing. “I get to make four more visits,” he said.

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This news video discusses the use of a cell phone-sniffing dog, appropriately named, “Sprint”, to find smuggled contraband cell phones in Oregon prisons. The video includes a demonstration of Sprint’s skills at the Santiam Correctional Institution in Salem.

Within seconds of the start of the demonstration, Sprint honed in on the scent of a cell phone hidden under an inmate’s pillow. According to the report, “High-end electronics such as cell phones have a unique odor. He’s not listening for sound, it’s not anything else. It’s all odor based.”

Interestingly, given the popularity and prevalence of contraband wireless phones, Sprint has yet to locate an inmate-smuggled phone. The meshDETECT secure cell phone solution uses uniquely identifiable cell phones so that they can be differentiated from contraband cell phones.

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