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Thread: Prison Cell Phones

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    Prison Cell Phones

    ATLANTA — A counterfeiter at a Georgia state prison ticks off the remaining days of his three-year sentence on his Facebook page. He has 91 digital “friends.” Like many of his fellow inmates, he plays the online games FarmVille and Street Wars.

    He does it all on a Samsung smartphone, which he says he bought from a guard. And he used the same phone to help organize a short strike among inmates at several Georgia prisons last month.

    Technology is changing life inside prisons across the country at the same rapid-fire pace it is changing life outside. A smartphone hidden under a mattress is the modern-day file inside a cake.

    “This kind of thing was bound to happen,” said Martin F. Horn, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The physical boundaries that we thought protected us no longer work.”

    Although prison officials have long battled illegal cellphones, smartphones have changed the game. With Internet access, a prisoner can call up phone directories, maps and photographs for criminal purposes, corrections officials and prison security experts say. Gang violence and drug trafficking, they say, are increasingly being orchestrated online, allowing inmates to keep up criminal behavior even as they serve time.

    “The smartphone is the most lethal weapon you can get inside a prison,” said Terry L. Bittner, director of security products with the ITT Corporation, one of a handful of companies that create cellphone-detection systems for prisons. “The smartphone is the equivalent of the old Swiss Army knife. You can do a lot of other things with it.”

    The Georgia prison strike, for instance, was about things prisoners often complain about: They are not paid for their labor. Visitation rules are too strict. Meals are bad.

    But the technology they used to voice their concerns was new.

    Inmates punched in text messages and assembled e-mail lists to coordinate simultaneous protests, including work stoppages, with inmates at other prisons. Under pseudonyms, they shared hour-by-hour updates with followers on Facebook and Twitter. They communicated with their advocates, conducted news media interviews and monitored coverage of the strike.

    In Oklahoma, a convicted killer was caught in November posting photographs on his Facebook page of drugs, knives and alcohol that had been smuggled into his cell. In 2009, gang members in a Maryland prison were caught using their smartphones to approve targets for robberies and even to order seafood and cigars.

    Even closely watched prisoners are sneaking phones in. Last month, California prison guards said they had found a flip phone under Charles Manson’s mattress.

    The logical solution would be to keep all cellphones out of prison. But that is a war that is being lost, corrections officials say. Prisoners agree.

    “Almost everybody has a phone,” said Mike, 33, an inmate at Smith State Prison in Georgia who, like other prisoners interviewed for this article, asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation. “Almost every phone is a smartphone. Almost everybody with a smartphone has a Facebook.”

    Cellphones are prohibited in all state and federal prisons in the United States, often even for top corrections officials. Punishment for a prisoner found with one varies. In some states, it is an infraction that affects parole or time off for good behavior. In others, it results in new criminal charges.

    President Obama signed a law in August making possession of a phone or a wireless device in a federal prison a felony, punishable by up to a year of extra sentencing.

    Still, they get in. By the thousands. In the first four months of 2010, Federal Bureau of Prisons workers confiscated 1,188 cellphones, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who sponsored the federal measure. In California last year, officers discovered nearly 9,000 phones.

    Payments for cellphones range from $300 to $1,000, depending on the type of phone and the service plan. Monthly fees are generally paid by inmates’ relatives. Phones are smuggled in by guards, visitors and inmates convicted of misdemeanors with lower security restrictions.

    But that is not the only way. In South Carolina, where most prisons are rural and staff members have to pass through X-ray machines and metal detectors, smugglers resort to an old-fashioned method — tossing phones over fences.

    They stuff smartphones into footballs or launch them from a device called a potato cannon or spud gun, which shoots a projectile through a pipe. Packages are sometimes camouflaged with a coating of grass, which makes them hard for guards to detect. The drops are coordinated through texts or calls between inmates and people outside, said Jon Ozmint, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, which confiscates as many as 2,000 cellphones a year.

    Even if officers intercept 75 percent of the packages, Mr. Ozmint said, that is still a lot of contraband getting in.

    “It is impossible to have enough staff to watch the two million people we have locked up in the country at this time,” he said. “In a perfect world, yes, we would find all the phones. But this isn’t a perfect world.”

    The solution, Mr. Ozmint and others say, is to simply jam cellphone signals in prisons. He and prison officials from 29 other states petitioned the Federal Communications Commission last year for permission to install technology that would render cellphones useless. But there is no support from the cellphone industry.

    “It’s illegal, plain and simple,” said Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association. He cited the Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits the blocking of radio signals — or, in this case, cellphone signals — from authorized users.

    Although supporters of jamming disagree, Mr. Guttman-McCabe argues that the technology is not yet good enough to prevent legal cellphones nearby but not inside prison walls to be jammed. Nor does the technology assure that every inch inside a prison is blocked, he said.

    The solution may be a new system introduced in Mississippi. It is being tested in several other states and has the cellphone industry’s support. Called managed access, the system establishes a network around a prison that detects every call and text. Callers using cellphones that are not on an approved list receive a message saying the device is illegal and will no longer function.

    At the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which houses about 3,000 inmates, 643,388 calls and texts going in and out were intercepted from July 31 to Dec. 1, 2010. The system was so successful that Mississippi is installing it at the state’s two other penitentiaries.

    Finding the actual cellphones inside a prison is another solution, and several states are testing systems. For example, Maryland and New Jersey are using dogs that can sniff out the ionization of cellphone batteries.

    “An effective, reliable cellphone-detection capability, that’s the holy grail,” said Mr. Horn, the criminal justice professor and expert on the use of illegal digital technology inside prisons.

    The recent rise in smartphones raises larger issues for prisoners and their advocates, who say the phones are not necessarily used for criminal purposes. In some prisons, a traditional phone call is prohibitive, costing $1 per minute in many states. And cellphones can help some offenders stay better connected with their families.

    Mike, the Georgia inmate who was part of the recent strike, said he used his to stay in touch with his son.

    “When he gets off the school bus, I’m on the phone and I talk to him,” he said in an interview on his contraband cellphone. “When he goes to bed, I’m on the phone and I talk to him.”

    Some groups are encouraging prisons to embrace new technology while managing risks. Inmates are more likely to successfully re-enter society if they maintain relationships with friends and families, said David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

    “It shows that even if they are closed institutions, prisons are still part of the larger society,” Mr. Fathi said. “They can’t be forever walled off from technological changes.”

    And in a world where hundreds of apps are introduced each day by developers hoping to tap new markets, a pool of prisoners with smartphones can seem an attractive new market, despite the implications.

    “It’s a pure business opportunity,” said Hal Goldstein, the publisher of iPhone Life magazine. He predicted that games would be big, but so would the ability to download news and books.

    “People outside of prison become addicted to their phones,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Can you imagine if you had nothing but time on your hands?”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/us...pagewanted=all

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    Killers keep up with pals online
    Inmates using Facebook; some taunt victims, others carry on criminal activity



    CHARLESTON — Quincy Howard is ensconced behind the razor-wired walls of a state prison for killing a man in Marion County three years ago, but that hasn’t stopped him from keeping up with his “friends” on Facebook.

    In fact, the 22-year-old convict added more than 100 new friends in the past week while serving a 30-year sentence for manslaughter at the maximum-security Lee Correctional Institute in Bishopville.

    He stares out from his Facebook page in a prison jumpsuit, accrues points in the Mafia Wars game and grouses about being “RAILROADED BY THIS CROOKED A** JUDICIAL SYSTEM IN SOUTH CAROLINA.”



    State prison officials say they shut down Howard’s means of illicit communication when they seized a contraband cell phone from his quarters this month. He is now in disciplinary detention and stripped of his telephone and visitation privileges. But his page still shows signs of activity.

    A Marion County reader alerted The Post and Courier Watchdog to Howard’s page. The newspaper found at least two convicted murderers from Charleston with profiles on Facebook as well. As with Howard, it can be difficult to tell if they are posting information themselves or funneling it to a proxy on the outside.

    Either way, authorities have become increasingly concerned about the potential for inmates to use social media and modern technology to taunt victims and carry on criminal activities from behind prison walls.

    Cell phones and smartphones are banned in prisons across the nation, but they are routinely smuggled in, giving inmates ready access to the outside world.

    “It renders the prison fence sort of useless in some cases,” Corrections Department spokesman Josh Gelinas said.

    The power of this technology behind bars was demonstrated last month when Georgia inmates used smartphones to organize a prison strike at four facilities, prompting lockdowns, authorities said.

    Closer to home, a veteran captain at Lee Correctional Institute was shot six times last year after an inmate used a smuggled cell phone to order a “hit” on the officer at his home. Officials worry that access to social media sites such as Facebook will expand the reach of inmates bent on wrongdoing.

    “For inmates to have that kind of unfettered access to the outside is an affront to the justice system and a slap in the face of victims, not to mention a tremendous safety threat,” 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said.

    A line to the outside

    South Carolina inmates aren’t allowed Internet access, and prison officials investigate whenever they learn of a prisoner on Facebook, Gelinas said. Any cell phones found are immediately confiscated.

    But phones keep finding their way inside, often by way of accomplices tossing them over the prison fence. And authorities have no way of knowing just how many inmates may be making use of social media sites, Gelinas said.

    For two years, South Carolina has been seeking federal permission to jam cell phone signals at state prisons, but the request has stalled before the Federal Communications Commission, despite support from 30 other states.

    Regulators cite a federal law blocking states from jamming public airwaves.

    So the state is now exploring alternate technology that would allow authorities to intercept and block unapproved wireless calls emanating from prisons, an approach that has proven successful in Mississippi, Gelinas said.

    Last year alone, South Carolina corrections officers seized about 2,000 cell phones from the state’s prisons. By comparison, nearly five times as many phones were confiscated from California prisons. Even notorious mass murderer Charles Manson had one.

    Manson hasn’t posted a profile on Facebook, but other killers and crooks have. One Oklahoma inmate, imprisoned for killing a sheriff, recently caused a stir by posting photos of himself smoking marijuana, holding a bottle of booze and flashing knives inside a prison.

    Another police killer, on death row in Tennessee, racked up nearly 300 friends before Facebook disabled his account. And in England, The Guardian newspaper reported that 30 Facebook pages were removed after British prisoners used them to taunt their victims.

    Skirting the rules

    Facebook doesn’t ban prison inmates from signing up and has no idea how many convicts are registered with the site, according to Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public policy communications manager.

    Facebook, however, will disable inmate accounts if it learns that someone on the outside is updating a prisoner’s profile, which violates the site’s rules, he said.

    That appears to be the case with some inmate profiles, including that of Marion County’s Howard, who had 450 Facebook friends by week’s end, including a pastor.

    Howard seemed to spend the majority of last year playing the strategy games Mafia Wars and Cafe World, while offering various misspelled updates assuring friends that he was “guud” and “maintainn.” His last post was Jan. 16.

    A message sent to his page by The Post and Courier generated a response by someone who described himself as Howard’s “representer.” He or she claimed ownership of the page and suggested the newspaper pursue other, more important topics.

    Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2011/01/23/1...#ixzz1BrJlOmoE

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    Prison phones lead to melee

    A contraband sweep at the Arkansas Department of Corrections' Varner Unit early Saturday morning led to the seizure of several cell phones and an incident in which up to 20 inmates "jumped" four prison guards, sending them to the hospital and injuring one seriously enough that he was kept overnight and will require surgery to his face. The sweep came after the discovery of two large caches of cell phones and other contraband in recent weeks, one of which made it into the prison before being discovered.

    More on the jump...

    Dina Tyler, spokesperson for the ADC, said the melee came as 100 corrections officers were performing a 1 a.m. sweep of a 50-bed barracks at Varner prison — which, it should be noted, is a separate facility from Varner Supermax, which houses death row.

    Tyler said that while a corrections officer was standing guard at the toilets during the search to keep inmates from flushing drugs, a number of prisoners attacked him. He was able to escape from the building unharmed, but four guards who rushed in after he raised an alarm were beaten by more than 20 inmates. While three of the guards suffered minor injuries and were treated and released from a local hospital, one had the bones around his eye broken by a punch or kick. The injury will require surgery to repair.

    "We found during that sweep, I believe, seven cell phones," Tyler said. "In that one barracks, there were four, so that's probably the root of the cause." Tyler said that the Saturday night sweep also turned up four homemade shanks.

    Tyler said that while the prison routinely performs contraband shakedowns, the Varner sweep Saturday morning "had a lot to do" with the recent discovery of two large caches of contraband cell phones.

    On February 17, Tyler said, a bag containing 38 cell phones, tobacco, 3-1/2 ounces of marijuana, and various other contraband like rolling papers, batteries and toothbrushes was found inside Varner prison in a trash can near the kitchen, after a kitchen supervisor saw an inmate acting suspiciously near the can. The supervisor was questioned, but not disciplined over the incident, Tyler said.

    On February 22, another bag containing tobacco, hair gel, smokeless tobacco and another 28 cell phones was found in a storm drain outside the prison. Tyler said that several employees and inmates have been questioned in the incident, but only the prisoner spotted near the trash can in the kitchen incident has been linked to the phones.

    Providing an inmate with a cell phone or the use of a cell phone by an inmate is a class B felony. The ADC found 277 cell phones inside their prisons last year. They are a particular problem at Varner, Tyler said, because cell service and the way the prison is constructed makes it one of the few Arkansas corrections facilities in which prisoners can use cell phones while inside the building.

    "Cell phones are obviously a hot commodity," she said. "If they want to do something dastardly, that's the way to do it. In fact, our last four escapes have been orchestrated with cell phones. That should tell you something."

    http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog...-lead-to-melee

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    Texas Prison Escape Used Smuggled Cell Phone

    A Texas convict who escaped a week ago from a Beaumont prison used a smuggled cell phone to arrange his freedom — the first time one has been used in an escape, authorities confirmed this afternoon.

    Authorities said David Puckett, 27, serving 30 years for aggravated assault on a public servant from Lavaca County, fled the Stiles Unit after using a smuggled cell phone to contact a Nebraska woman. She was supposed to pick him up after he escaped, officials said.

    Omaha resident Mattice Mayo, 25, was arrested Monday night after Puckett was apprehended in Omaha arriving on a bus. She is believed to have wired him the money for the bus ticket, investigators said.

    Investigators said they are checking information that Puckett met Mayo on a social networking site for convicts that he accessed with the smuggled cell phone, and had a Twitter account and Facebook page that he used to send messages.

    According to an arrest affidavit obtained by Statesman.com, Puckett made 297 calls to a phone traced to Mayo between September and November 2010.

    The new details about the use of a smuggled call phone enraged Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, who was the target of a death threat two years ago after a death row convict called him on a smuggled cell phone.

    “This is absolutely outrageous,” Whitmire said. “Apparently the (Texas Department of Criminal Justice) is incapable of blocking cell phones from getting into prisons, and now one has been used in an escape. Before we experience a tragedy, this needs to be stopped.”

    Whitmire demanded that Gov. Rick Perry authorize prison officials to immediately begin jamming cell-phone signals in state prisons. A Perry aide could not immediately be reached for comment.

    “We need zero tolerance on cell phones in prisons. Whatever it takes,” Whitmire said after learning about the role of the smuggled cell phone in the escape.

    “This state should do whatever it takes to stop cell phones from getting into prisons, and if the current leadership at TDCJ can’t do that, we need to find someone who can.”

    Prison system spokesman Jason Clark said that the Stiles Unit was locked down after the escape. Other officials said this afternoon that a cell-by-cell search was under way.

    Ever since prison officials began a crackdown on smuggled cell phones in October 2008, after Whitmire got the call from death row, the Stiles Unit has remained at the top of the list for locations where the most smuggled phones turn up.

    Last year, Texas prison officials said they seized more than 800 cell phones and related gear from convicts at Texas’ 112 prisons — most of it from eight prisons where smuggling continues to be a significant problem.

    http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...uggled_ce.html

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    Prison test will stop short of cell jamming

    Texas’ first test of technology designed to curb cell-phone smuggling into state prisons will stop just short of actually jamming any signals, officials confirmed this afternoon.

    To do so would violate federal law, and might land state officials in the slammer.

    “We won’t actually be doing any jamming, just having the various technology demonstrated to us,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman fore the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

    After Brad Livingston, executive director of the state corrections system, acknowledged to the House Corrections Committee on Wednesday that “the only real solution is to jam cell phones so they will no longer have any value,” some legislative leaders were puzzled since a 1934 federal law prohibits any jamming of radio — or cell phone — signals.

    They also questioned how the jamming demonstration could proceed early week at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont, without running afoul of the law.

    This afternoon, prison officials said a Florida-based company, CellAntenna, will demonstrate several technologies — from how jamming gear would work to managed-access equipment that blocks all cell calls except those whose phone numbers are authorized.

    Tests will be run on Monday and Tuesday for prison officials, with an evaluation slated on Wednesday. The sessions will not be open to the public, officials said.

    “There is technology that allows us to locate the signals of cell phones inside a unit — and then jam the signal,” Lyons said. A managed access system would allow a message to be sent back to a phone that was making a call, saying that the call was not going to be put through.”

    Officials at CellAntenna, who offered more than two years ago to conduct a demonstration for Texas officials, could not immediately be reached for comment for additional details of the Beaumont test.

    Last September, Mississippi prison officials installed a managed-access system to at its state penitentiary to combat smuggled cell phones, the first prison use of the technology in the United States.

    Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps said then that the system uses radio frequencies that intercept cell-phone transmissions within a defined area, but permits authorized and 911 calls. He said it complies with FCC rules and federal law.

    In South Carolina, which has been struggling to curb criminal activity from smuggled cell phones for two years, prison system spokesman John Barkley said a request for jamming is still pending with the FCC after almost two years.

    “We’re not any closer on actual jamming,” he said.

    Cell phones in Texas prisons have been an issue since October 2008, when a convicted killer on death row used a smuggled phone to call a state senator. The convict got busted, then threatened to kill the senator.

    Demands for a demonstration of jamming technology were dismissed at the time by prison officials, because of the federal law banning it.

    But after David Puckett, serving 30 years for aggravated assault on a police officer in Lavaca County, escaped on March 9 after using a smuggled cell phone to arrange his freedom. He was arrested in Omaha on Monday, along with a Nebraska woman who investigators said helped him escape.

    It was one of 221 smuggled cell-phones seized at the Beaumont prison during the past year, and among 791 at Texas’ 112 prisons overall.

    House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, said next week’s test should be a first step to get cell-phone jamming in prisons approved by Congress. A bill allowing jamming that passed the Senate last year did not pass the House.

    He said jamming is the best — and cheapest — solution. While jamming gear would cost about $500,000 per prison, a managed-access system could run $2.5 million, he said.

    “But whatever technology Texas selects, we need to get the test completed and move ahead to solve this problem, once and for all,” Madden said.

    http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...hone_test.html

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    Beaumont prison where inmate escaped has high rate of guards sneaking in cellphones

    The Beaumont prison from which an inmate escaped with the help of a cellphone earlier this month has one of Texas' worst track records for prison personnel bringing cellphones into the facility.

    That's according to a Texas Watchdog analysis of prison system data procured by WOAI-Channel 4 in San Antonio.

    Stiles Unit, the maximum-security facility from which David Puckett, 27, escaped and made his way to Nebraska, had the third-highest number of incidents in which Texas Department of Criminal Justice workers were accused of bringing or allowing cellphones, phone components or accessories into prison confines between 2006 and mid-2010, the data show. It had 42 such cases.

    With nearly 3,000 inmates and 800 employees, Stiles tied with Neal Unit, another maximum-security prison near Amarillo, for the highest number of overall reported cellphone-related disciplinary infractions for state staff, with 46, the database shows. TDCJ oversees 113 adult prison and state jail facilities.

    Authorities haven't said how they think Puckett obtained the phone he used to plan his breakout and meet up with a female admirer in Omaha, where he was recaptured. But the prison system's inspector general, John Moriarty, said prison personnel are a factor in phones coming into the Texas prisons.

    "One bad employee can bring in a lot of phones," Moriarty said.

    Altogether, the data show more than 1,100 instances in which Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees were accused of breaking prison system rules by bringing cellphones or phone parts into prisons -- intentionally or accidentally -- or otherwise allowing inmates to access a cellphone over three and a half years.

    In two-thirds of the cases, the employee was found not guilty, Texas Watchdog found.

    "The reason is that in many cases, (the prison system's inspector general) did not find evidence that the individual intended to bring a phone into the unit for the purposes of smuggling it to an offender," TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said in an e-mail.

    "There obviously is a big difference between an officer who is found with their personal phone in their front pocket because they forget to take it out, and an officer who has six phones and chargers taped to their stomach. Still, those employees who forget to remove their phone from their pocket, etc., may face disciplinary action."

    Some of the cases are noted in state records as accidental, such as when guards or other staff reported for duty and found they had accidentally brought their cellphone with them in a coat pocket. In nearly two dozen instances, records show, Texas prison personnel turned themselves in when they realized they still had their phone on them.

    But they aren't all accidental, state records indicate. It seems Texas prison employees, like the rest of the world, can't stand to be away from their phones, even when their bosses demand it.

    Cellphones have been discovered in Texas prisons inside employees' smocks and pants pockets; a clerk's bra strap; a psychologist's box of paperwork, in guards' jacket pockets, eyeglass cases, and lunch bags, and wrapped in napkins and a Ziploc bag and hidden under a box of food, just to name a few places, records show.

    Some examples from the database: A chaplain at the Cotulla inmate transfer facility in South Texas tried to sneak in his cellphone inside his motorcycle helmet. A phone was found lying in a flower bed inside the secured area at Woodman Unit, outside Waco; another guard's phone was found left in a bathroom at Wynne Unit outside Huntsville. A prison lieutenant's phone was found inside a boot when he left his uniform boots to be shined by an inmate at a prison north of Lubbock.

    Phones are the most troublesome contraband in state prisons

    Phones are the No. 1 most troublesome contraband in the Texas prisons, Moriarty said -- but they are a problem facing other states as well.

    California authorities, who confiscated 10,000 cellphones in their prisons last year, recently found even Charles Manson had one; they confiscated it but later found he'd acquired another one.

    Prison inmates across the nation have used cellphones to "intimidate and threaten witnesses; transmit photographs, including offensive pictures sent to victims; orchestrate crimes, such as gang activity; coordinate escapes; bribe prison officers; order retaliation against other inmates; text other prisoners; gain access to the Internet; and create security breaches," said a 2010 report by two criminal justice professors that appeared in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin last year.

    The key source of phones in California's prisons, the state inspector general said in a 2009 report, was prison staff members. One guard made $150,000 in bribes alone by selling 150 phones to inmates, the report said. The guard was fired -- taking in a cellphone is against California prison rules -- but he couldn't be prosecuted criminally because California has no specific law against it, the inspector general said.

    That's not the case in Texas. It's a felony offense here to supply an inmate with a cellphone or a cellphone component, such as a "subscriber identity module" or "SIM" card, on which user information such as phone numbers are stored, or to purchase minutes of service for a phone being used by an inmate.

    But that doesn't stop the flow of phones into Texas prisons. The state confiscated 791 cellphones in Texas prisons last year, and one in every four was found at Stiles Unit, Moriarty said.

    More than two dozen phones and phone components were found on Texas' death row at Polunsky Unit outside Livingston in 2008. Those searches were part of a statewide sweep of prisons prompted by convicted killer Richard Tabler's threatening phone calls to state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. (Prison officials later found Tabler's mother and sister had put minutes on his phone, which he and his buddies had used to make 2,800 calls.)

    Texas prison employees are also forbidden by rule from bringing personal cellphones into a prison at any time, Moriarty said.

    Employees arriving at a prison can leave their personal cellphones in their locked cars in the parking lot while they work, but they're not allowed to have them beyond that point. Employees who have been issued cellphones by the state -- usually just the higher-ups, Moriarty said -- can bring those phones with them inside the prison, though they must be checked in upon arrival and when they leave.

    Many of the phones mentioned in the Texas state database were found as the employee entered the prison building. But others were discovered the old fashioned way -- being either spotted or heard by supervisors, such as the case of the assistant warden at a state jail in Beaumont whose cellphone rang in her office, and the guard at Wynne Unit whose phone rang as he walked into the gatehouse.

    Another guard, stationed at his post outside Darrington Unit in Brazoria County in December 2007, made the mistake of using his cellphone to repeatedly call his boss inside the prison, where the ranking officer's Caller ID gave him away. He was put on probation for six months, records show.

    But those cases might seem minor compared to those of guards accused of bring cellphones, SIM cards and other components into the prison with the intention of selling or otherwise providing the phones to inmates.

    In one case from 2009, a Texas prison sergeant confiscated a cellphone from an inmate and was later accused of selling that phone to another inmate. Last year, a guard brought in three cellphones wrapped in Saran wrap -- and when the phones were found, she assaulted the lieutenant, records say.

    Both of those cases were at Stiles Unit, records show.

    Altogether, the database shows some 40 cases in which prison personnel were accused of bringing in cellphones at Stiles. The accused ranged from rank-and-file guards and staff members to two majors who were reported walking into the prison with their phones# on the same day in October 2009.

    "Without bad officers Puckett probably would have never had the cell phone," David Bellow, a former guard at Stiles' administrative segregation unit, wrote in an open letter to Texas prison authorities published online a few days ago. But Bellow blamed TDCJ's thin staffing of the prisons, leading to overworked guards responsible for too many inmates, as the main issue behind Puckett's escape, along with a "blind spot" on the prison grounds that he says is widely known to the Stiles community.

    He's not the only one to stay Stiles Unit has multiple problems. Whitmire, chairman of the powerful Senate Criminal Justice Committee, last week called Stiles "the worst of the worst" in a Houston Chronicle interview. The Backgate, a Web site largely focused on Texas prison issues, last week called Stiles "perpetually troubled," though it lauded the work of Stiles' still-new senior warden, Richard Alford, for "improvement in contraband issues, and weeding out of corrupt employees."

    The state says it's working on the problem. "At the Stiles Unit in particular, we are in the process of installing hundreds of video surveillance cameras which will assist in our efforts and serve as a further deterrent to individuals who are considering smuggling contraband into the facility," Lyons said.

    The work should be finished in May. Cameras have already been installed at Polunsky Unit and are currently being installed at Darrington, she said.

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...n/7487259.html

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    Cellphones Found in Dallas County Federal Prison

    Two cellphones were discovered last week at the Federal Corrections Institution in Seagoville, NBCDFW has learned.

    FCI Seagoville executive assistant Jeff Butler would not elaborate on how the phones may have gotten there.

    "We investigate all allegations," Butler said during a phone interview Thursday. "This is still under investigation."

    Operations at the federal prison are back to normal after guards worked for several days to locate all the smuggled phones.

    The prison in Seagoville is not a traditional lockup, with individual holding areas. It is a low-security, dorm-style setting, and inmates are allowed to walk around fairly freely, potentially giving them broader access to contraband.

    Inmates acquiring smuggled cellphones is one of the many battles prison systems nationwide face daily.

    Convicted crooks can send text messages to cohorts outside the prison walls to do their bidding and still orchestrate crimes while in jail. Inmates in other states have coordinated simultaneous protests with inmates at other prisons.

    A convicted killer in Oklahoma was caught last year posting pictures on a Facebook page of contraband such as drugs, knives and alcohol that had been smuggled into his cell.

    Even one of the country's most famous inmates, Charles Manson, was caught calling people across the country on a phone guards discovered under his prison cell bed in March 2009. He was caught with a second phone just last January.

    In 2008, Texas death-row inmate Richard Tabler sparked a statewide prison sweep after he called and threatened Texas state Sen. John Whitmire using a smuggled phone. That sparked the prison lockdown and a sweep that turned up 132 illegal phones.

    "It's a daily battle for us to make sure we're maintaining the safety of the staff and inmate population at all times," Butler said.

    Corrections officials are trying new ways to strike back.

    Many are testing a system to capture every cellphone signal from a prison and block unauthorized calls as they search for technology to stop what has become a growing problem inside prison walls.

    Hoping to stop federal inmates from directing crimes from behind bars, President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010 a prohibition on cellphone use by prisoners.

    The law prohibits the use or possession of mobile phones and wireless devices and calls for up to one year in prison for anyone convicted of trying to smuggle one to an inmate.

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons confiscated more than 2,600 cellphones from minimum-security facilities such as FCI Seagoville and nearly 600 from secure federal institutions in 2009.

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons said FCI Seagoville is a low-security facility housing male offenders. FCI Seagoville is located 11 miles southeast of Dallas, off Highway 175.

  8. #8
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    Smuggled mobile phones may be the most dangerous weapons a prison inmate can have

    California prison officials have twice caught Charles Manson -- the cult leader who masterminded a 1960s murder rampage -- with a smuggled mobile phone after he chatted with folks across the country.

    In Texas, prison officials seized a smuggled phone after a death row inmate called a state senator looking for help with his appeal.

    And in South Carolina, after a prison official was ambushed at his home and nearly killed, authorities determined prisoners used a smuggled phone to organize the attack.

    Smartphones, cellphones and other mobile devices are the most dangerous tools in prison, and officials haven't found a way to keep them out, said Martin Horn, a former commissioner of New York City's corrections department who now teaches at John Jay College.

    "The purpose of imprisonment is to separate criminals from society, and these phones wipe that away," Horn said. "You can access anything on the Internet, and that presents an enormous and growing challenge."

    In the first four months of 2010, Federal Bureau of Prisons workers confiscated 1,188 cellphones. Many state prisons also were overwhelmed. Guards in California's prisons, for example, seized more than 8,500 smuggled phones in 2010.

    That dwarfs Ohio's numbers -- about 100 phones seized in prison last year -- but the trend is picking up here. Between January and May, Ohio authorities reported seizing about 100 phones, said Vinko Kucinic, the chief security threat investigator at the Ohio Department of Corrections.

    How do the phones -- considered contraband -- make it inside?

    • Friends or family of inmates stuff phones inside footballs and hike the balls over fences into prison yards for inmates to pick up.

    •Visitors hide the phones in diapers a baby is wearing or in a body cavity.

    •Corrupt prison guards bring them in, including a California guard who told state investigators he made more than $100,000 in one year from smuggling phones.

    For guards, it's a low-risk, high-profit venture, Horn said.

    Smuggling cocaine or heroin to inmates is dangerous because if you're caught -- on or off prison grounds -- you're breaking the law.

    But carrying a phone isn't illegal to start with. And if a guard leaves a phone on a windowsill and an inmate picks it up, it's often difficult for prison authorities to prove smuggling, Horn said.

    Inmates often pay from $300 to $1,500 for a smuggled phone, Horn and other prison security experts say.

    In Ohio prisons, inmates hide phones in hollowed-out books or secret compartments in their cells. They also hide shared phones in public spaces where inmates gather, Kucinic said.

    How Dimorio McDowell -- the federal inmate who ran an organized retail theft operation in Northeast Ohio from his New Jersey prison cell -- received his phones or how he hid them from guards is unclear.

    Prison officials at Fort Dix declined to answer questions, saying details could compromise security.

    Many prison officials say it's impossible to keep phones away from the 2 million inmates in the U.S. The solution, some have suggested, is to jam phone signals in prisons, making the phones useless.

    But the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry says that would be illegal under the Federal Communications Act of 1934 -- which prohibits blocking signals.

    Mississippi found a compromise -- managed access. A computer network there tracks all calls and texts coming in and going out of prisons.

    If someone tries to use an unauthorized phone, calls and texts are blocked. In the first six months, the system blocked nearly 650,000 calls at one prison.

    But managed access has its drawbacks, Horn cautioned. It's expensive and, eventually, it will be hacked.

    "Just because you're a prison inmate doesn't mean you're stupid," Horn said. "They'll figure out a way to get around it."

    http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011...es_may_be.html

  9. #9
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    Texas explores California solution to smuggled cell phones in prison

    It's not often that Texas looks to California for much of anything, except to relocate corporate jobs. But a new Golden State deal to curb calls from prisons on smuggled cellphones has state officials exploring a similar system.

    Instead of jamming cellphone calls around prisons as Texas officials had earlier proposed, the California system would block outgoing cell calls, Web access and text messages by managing the cellphone signals at prisons — and allowing only signals from approved numbers to go through.

    Jason Clark, a spokesman for the state Department of Criminal Justice, confirmed Wednesday that the agency is working with Century Link — the private company that operates pay phones inside Texas' 111 state prisons — to evaluate a similar system for installation in Texas.

    "The system would be a managed-access system and does not jam cellphones," Clark said. "Managed access intercepts the outgoing calls and only allows calls from approved numbers. This is legal," Clark said, noting that the Federal Communications Commission prohibits jamming. Texas and other states sought legislation to overturn the prohibition, but cellphone companies — worried about interference with nonprison signals — blocked the proposals in Congress.

    Smuggled cellphones in Texas prisons have posed a security risk for the past decade. The situation drew headlines and triggered a weeks-long lockdown of the entire state prison system in late 2008 after a death row convict made threatening calls to a state senator and a reporter.

    Efforts to curb cellphone smuggling into prisons have come up short, even though the state has spent millions of dollars on screening devices, surveillance cameras, detection devices and even phone-sniffing dogs.

    Clark said Texas prison employees last year seized 904 cellphones in prisons or headed there, down from 1,480 three years ago. Prison officials attribute the decline to $60 million in security upgrades.

    By contrast, California last year confiscated 15,000 cellphones at its 33 prisons. That's up from just 1,200 five years ago, according to officials.

    Dana Simas, an information officer for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said that under a new contract, Global Tel Link has agreed to spend as much as $35 million to install new equipment at each prison within the next three years. The first California unit is to get the gear by October, she said.

    The company will pay all costs, Simas said, because it will get the revenue from the pay phones inside prisons that will once again be in demand.

    The way the new system works: Each prison will get its own cell tower that will allow prison officials to control all incoming and outgoing calls. All others will not go through.

    "After this system goes in, smuggled cellphones will be nothing more than glorified paperweights," Simas said. "A couple of years ago, there were long lines at the pay phones — hours long. By this year, no one was using them, there were so many smuggled cellphones."

    California officials said they happened on the idea of tying cellphone smuggling to the pay phone contract when it came up for renewal last year.

    In March 2011, Texas prison officials tested a managed-access system at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont — a top location for smuggled phones — but decided not to purchase the gear because of its $2.5 million-per-prison cost.

    Global Tel Link and Century Link did not respond Wednesday to messages for comment.

    Like most other states, prison officials in Texas and California for several years have been battling a steady flood of smuggled cellphones — easily concealed devices that have been linked to murders, criminal activity by gangs, smuggling, violent assaults on guards, escapes and even a prison riot or two in other states.

    After news broke about Texas' death-row caller, Richard Tabler, prison officials imposed a statewide lockdown of all prisons and spent weeks searching every cell. More than 500 additional cellphones were found, including two dozen more on death row.

    California, with 138,000 convicts compared to Texas' approximately 155,000, has had similar headlines. Charles Manson, the notorious murderer, has been caught twice with contraband phones, officials said.

    In announcing the deal on Monday, California Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said the "groundbreaking and momentous technology" will allow his system "to crack down on the smuggled phones."

    In Texas, state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the committee that supervises the prison system and the lawmaker who received the 2008 call — and later a death threat — from Tabler, said Texas' move toward curbing smuggled cellphones is long overdue.

    "Our administration should be getting right on that," he said after learning about the California contract. "They should have been more proactive."

    "We need to get these cellphones out of there, and we don't need to wait until the next time somebody on death row calls me."

    http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-...s-2313583.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Inmate Shakedown At Oklahoma State Penitentiary Turns Up 2 Cell Phones

    McALESTER, Oklahoma -

    The Oklahoma State Penitentiary conducted an institutional shakedown "Search of Offender Housing" on Wednesday.

    Officials at the prison in McAlester said the process began early Wednesday morning and ended just before noon.

    The Oklahoma State Penitentiary is the state's maximum-security institution and home to Oklahoma's Death Row.

    Assistant Warden Terry Crenshaw says the shakedown gave the prison the opportunity to search many housing areas at the same time.

    He said by doing this, it prevents inmates from removing or relocating contraband before officers can search all the housing units.

    Crenshaw said officers did not find any drugs, but did find two cell phones, which are illegal and three items of contraband which could have been used as weapons.

    http://www.newson6.com/story/18906519/prison
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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