Prison cell-phone blocking to start
State prison officials confirmed today that Texas’ first program to block calls from smuggled cell phones will begin later this year at two prisons where contraband remains a problem.
The move comes almost four years after a condemned killer on death row triggered a statewide scandal and unprecedented lockdown of the entire corrections system by calling a powerful state senator on a smuggled cell phone, then threatening to kill him for calling in police.
Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee at a Capitol hearing that a “managed-access system” is to be installed by the end of the year at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont and the McConnell Unit in Beeville.
Livingston said the new system will not jam cell phone calls in and around prisons, but will instead intercept all outgoing calls. Only those to numbers that have been pre-approved will be allowed to go through, and the rest “will go to a dead end,” he said.
“It will help us eliminate the use of smuggled cell phones by eliminating their viability to make outgoing calls,” he said. “Jamming of all cell phone is illegal. This system is legal … because calls are allowed to go through.”
The new system is much like one that had proven successful at curbing smuggled cell phones in California prisons. Texas officials had confirmed in April that they were looking into the California system.
Livingston said the new managed-access technology is being paid for by Century Link, a private firm that operates pay phones inside Texas’ 111 state prisons. Officials earlier said the cost was around $1 million per prison.
“These two prisons have had the most significant ongoing problems with (smuggled) cellphones and that’s why they were selected,” Livingston said. “There are no plans at this time to go beyond these two units.”
In 2011, three years after the crackdown, officials said 148 smuggled cell phones were confiscated at Stiles and 88 were found at McConnell.
State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the committee that was briefed on the new system this morning and the lawmaker who was phoned from death row by convict Richard Tabler in October 2008, applauded the decision.
“It’s about time,” he said.
As a result of calls to Whitmire and this reporter, Tabler was busted and the entire prison system was locked down for weeks while officials did a cell-by-cell search for smuggled phones and other contraband. Hundreds were found, including several dozen more on death row.
Upset that his mother and sister were also arrested on charges related to the case, Tabler then threatened to kill Whitmire and this reporter, but apologized two years later, saying he had found the Lord.
He remains on death row awaiting execution for the 2004 shooting deaths of Killeen nightclub owner Mohamed-Amine Rahmouni, 25, and his friend Haitham Zayed, 28. Tabler was also charged in the murders of dancer Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amber Benefield, 16.
The shootings were part of what Bell County authorities described as a bizarre plot that targeted the four victims and eight or nine other people.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...king_to_s.html
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