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US Prisons Have a Cellphone Smuggling Problem (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes NBC:
Cellphones smuggled into prisons -- enabling inmates to order murders, plan escapes, deal drugs and extort money -- have become a scourge in a bloc of states where corrections officers annually confiscate as many as one for every three inmates... In South Carolina, prison officers have found and taken one phone for every three inmates, the highest rate in the country. In Oklahoma, it's one phone for every six prisoners, the nation's second-highest rate... Cellphones are prized because they allow inmates to avoid privatized jailhouse phone and visitation services that charge up to $15 for a two-minute call home to friends and family. "Inmates call their mothers like most of us do on holidays," said Dr. John Shaffer, former executive deputy secretary for the Pennsylvania Corrections Department.
But for some, the phones serve a darker purpose. "Most of these guys are just chitchatting with their girlfriends, but some of these guys are stone-hardened criminals running criminal enterprises," said Kevin Tamez of the MPM group, a litigation consulting firm that specializes in prison security... Meth rings operated by prisoners with cellphones, some with ties to prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Irish Mob Gang and the United Blood Nation, have been discovered in at least five Southern facilities. Phones have also played a role in breakouts, with one South Carolina inmate dialing up drone delivery of wire cutters and cash for his escape in July. Cellphones are so prevalent in the prison system, Tamez said, that "if you don't have them, you would look like a loser."
The article reports convicts have actually uploaded in-prison videos to Facebook Live and to Snapchat. "Georgia inmates used phones to take photos of themselves tying up or beating other prisoners, then texted the horrifying images to the victim's family and demanded cash."
But for some, the phones serve a darker purpose. "Most of these guys are just chitchatting with their girlfriends, but some of these guys are stone-hardened criminals running criminal enterprises," said Kevin Tamez of the MPM group, a litigation consulting firm that specializes in prison security... Meth rings operated by prisoners with cellphones, some with ties to prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Irish Mob Gang and the United Blood Nation, have been discovered in at least five Southern facilities. Phones have also played a role in breakouts, with one South Carolina inmate dialing up drone delivery of wire cutters and cash for his escape in July. Cellphones are so prevalent in the prison system, Tamez said, that "if you don't have them, you would look like a loser."
The article reports convicts have actually uploaded in-prison videos to Facebook Live and to Snapchat. "Georgia inmates used phones to take photos of themselves tying up or beating other prisoners, then texted the horrifying images to the victim's family and demanded cash."
as usual, management
The only thing that will stop this is jamming the signal in prisons and that will need to be under federal control seeing as it's the staff who smuggle most of the phones in.
Cellphones smuggled into prisons -- enabling inmates to order murders, plan escapes, deal drugs and extort money -- have become a scourge in a bloc of states where corrections officers anally confiscate as many as one for every three inmates.
n/t
"Inmates call their mothers like most of us do on holidays"
Call their mothers what . . . ? And what do inmates say about the Mamas of other inmates . . . ?
Meth rings operated by prisoners with cellphones, some with ties to prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Irish Mob Gang and the United Blood Nation
Ok, Aryan Brotherhood . . . probably some folks who have no fucking clue about what Hitler, Goebbels and their retinue were squawking about.
Irish Mob Gang: Isn't that title kinda a sorta reduntant . . . ?
"We called our first operation, "The Gang" . . . however, we have now upgraded ourselves to be a "Mob Gang"
The "United Blood Nation": a friend of mine has O+ and donates regularly. Can she apply do be a member . . . ? She told me that she doesn't donate to help other folks, but feels healthier after donating blood. Apparently, the folks who run blood banks love to have folks with blood type O+ waltz in.
"Georgia inmates used phones to take photos of themselves tying up or beating other prisoners, then texted the horrifying images to the victim's family and demanded cash.
Wasn't that what all the fuss about the book and business model, of "The Many Shades of Grey" was all about . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So long as they are not ordering pizza an Pepsi with those phones, all should be well.
Home of The Suki Series
A few of these and problem solved:
PRO45 High power mobile phone jammer
https://www.jammer-store.com/pro45-high-power-jammer.html
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It can be used indoors, for example to block the cell phone signal in the churches, museums, movie theatres and other crowded places where the usage of mobile phone is prohibited. You can also use this jammer during the important conference in a meeting room to avoid the leakage of secure information. This unit will be irreplaceable in places where it is extremely important to keep the silence – in classrooms during the exams, courts, hospitals, banks, recording studios etc.
If you want to disable the usage of mobile phones outdoors this jammer will be the perfect solution as well. We have a lot of customers worldwide who are looking for the best jamming solution to use it in prisons, customs, and military units, for border control and drug enforcement – PRO-45 is the right choice for these purposes.
This unit can be also used to protect your vehicle or convoy. With the unique set of antennas which can be chosen during the checkout process, you will be able to take out these antennas and put them outside of your car or escort car thus increase the jamming radius. "
This is what you get when you privatize prison system.
and in case you haven't heard yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Jamming communications that allow contacting emergency services lands you straight in federal prison.
Maybe not exactly the right tool, but something in that category. For some reason, the government can't figure out how to use Stingray properly and have a host of circuit court rulings against them.
In a prison, the cell phones of prisoners are contraband. A Stingray like device could be used for intercepting those and figuring out the rest of the criminal enterprises.
The BOP could also make cell phones contraband for the staff too, and solve a whole sorting problem.
Home of The Suki Series
What has me curious is how do they charge the cell phones?
Instead of spending all that time and effort on finding the cell phones, why not just jam the entire prison for GSM+ signals?
The guards working there shouldnt be talking on a cell phone, much less carry it with them inside. And if people REALLY needed to use a cell phone, a special room with a forwarder to a location far enough outside the prison would suffice.
This is just stupid.
This issue and the problem with drugs in prison demonstrate the futility of the current prohibition war on drugs. If we can't keep prohibited goods out of the hands of people in prison, what hope do we have of keeping them out of the hands of the public at large?
It's been said a million times already, but the solution, inasmuch as there is one, lies in education and treatment.
More directly on this topic, prisons should give inmates a fairly "generous" allotment of time to use on the proper phones and not charge so much at a minimum. I think it's been pretty well proven that inmates that are more engaged with their loved ones outside are far less likely to cause trouble in the prison. So if they allowed them more free/cheap access to those phones, there would be way less demand from the prisoners that simply want the phone to talk to friends/family which would make for less profits for the smugglers.
Stingray.
Very popular in prison. lol.
Over the years I've read various discussions concerning the problems caused by use of mobile phones in certain areas - for example within a cinema or theatre. Suggestions for remedies have included, for example, extending the cell phone standard to allow a "local suppressor signal", which could be generated by a licensed and restricted-access transmitter, and which would then need to be respected by handset OS providers.
I think the complexity of implementation prohibited further development...
However, there is a much simpler approach that could be of specific relevance to prisons, since these are, by their very nature, often "stand-alone" structures, kept well away from other buildings. The solution would involve placing multiple local cell towers at the periphery of the prison grounds, and have them provide a strong, healthy signal in the area. This would force all local handsets to handshake with one of these local towers.
Except these would be special towers, with the ability for the prison officers to use triangulation to determine the location of the handset. If there was a suggestion that a handset requesting access to the tower was physically within the area of the prison, then the handset could be blocked from accessing the cell network. Since the local towers would know the ID of the handset, it could simultaneously be sent a simple SMS message explaining why access had been blocked [as a courtesy to innocent passers-by, so they would know it wasn't a general reception problem]. This technique could easily be modified to permit guards to use their handsets in appropriate areas [such as a canteen]. Obviously, for security reasons, you would not want to permit guards to walk around inside a prison with a cell-phone [because a bribed guard could easily give an inmate access].
When enough towers are available, triangulation of handsets is both reliable and accurate, so not only could it be used to block use of handsets by inmates, it could in theory be used to determine the physical location of handsets to an area of the prison of no more than a few cells. If that could then be coupled with local hand-held scanners, locating and confiscating illegal handsets might become quite a lot easier.
Or maybe put less people in prison? As a European I can not suppress the impression that the US is using its prison system as a giant rug under which to hide some structural problems in its society. Alas, I see the same tendency here in some political parties, so it is probably only a matter of time ... but one may hope as long as one can vote.
I mean, this can be solved technically.
Prisons would be the one place where a Stingray would have legitimate use. However, the police find it much more interesting to listen to the pillow talk of law abiding citizens instead.
The solution to the smuggled cellphones into our prisons is quite obvious... install cellphone jammers to blanket all inmate sections in all prisons. Won't impact the need to use by guards/administrators. End of story.
"said Kevin Tamez of the MPM group, a litigation consulting firm that specializes in prison security..."
i dont know, maybe if you made the costs for normal phone calls much cheaper than you could eliminate the need for smuggling cellphones to those hardened criminals.
this sounds like another group of corporations asking for another handout from the government. Pretty much an excuse for private entities to raise their costs that they are going to charge the government. This is nothing more than a PR campaign so that the normal people like you and me aren't shocked when the prison system gets more money.
FTA: "But why are they so common in the South? Experts have linked contraband smuggling to low pay and high turnover for guards"
oh wait but it gets better, at the end of the article, the actual cause comes out:
" But special firmware installed on cellphones used at a correctional facility can completely block unauthorized phones behind bars from connecting to nearby cell towers "It turns off all functionality, including video recording, word processing, and texting and phone communications," Shaffer said. "
so its a play to have a say in the firmware on all cellphones to that those geo-located in prisons are disabled... Nice slippery slope you have there!it would be a shame if someone fell down it!
are about how to stop them from using the phones with 0 mention of the $15 2 minute privatized prison hellscape nightmare.
Yea, some of these people are hardened career criminals but not all and the exploitation of these people who are already being punished by society should be criminal itself. This is literally a captive audience and even worse than the cable monopolies in your area.
Prisons are already cages just make them Faraday. Cost same as enforcement,
only when the jamming is done illegally. homeland security can override the communications act so this really just requires some policy to be implemented, the laws already cater for it.
In the late 1960's and early '70's prisons were becoming alarmingly empty. Well in 1972 (sarcasm) good thing President Nixon came to the "rescue" starting the very expensive "War on Drugs," we pay taxes for. The prisons started to fill up again, mostly with people who could not afford a good attorney. - I would love to see an article explaining how we got to be the number 1 nation in imprisoning people. The over crowding that and systematic starvation. Cold and hot extremes they endure. How they now are making new laws to imprison more people because they have "Prisons for Profit", which are hungry for more prisoners. Forced labor. Forced payback on "rent" for your say. And we still pay taxes for private!! Also, how people get imprisoned for minor infractions like having as little 1 joint in their possession in some States.
The prison system thinks for the outside call land line system as a profit center.
But it appears to have a cost in a widespread incentive for cell phones inside the prison.
If the calls were free, then at least part of the incentive for cells inside would be gone.
On another note, it does seems like a person with a radio transmitter should be relatively easy to find.
Even Ajit Pai disagrees with your claim that state and local prisons only need a policy ruling to allow them to legally jam radio communications near and around them.
When even Pai says he can't change it on his own you know it's true. As someone said above, only the Feds can legally do this and there's no way many states or localities would allow the Feds any foothold in how their own prisons are run. Too many fears that ICE would use the leverage to make them hold illegal immigrants for deportation.
Prisons have a cellphone problem. The rest of us have a Stingray problem. Put two and two together, apply whitelisting and recording as appropriate, and add a footnote about a "reasonable expectation of privacy". Problem solved.
Doesn't this seem like a perfect installation of a StringRay cell phone tracker? Provide cell service in the prisons and monitor and jam at will.
Jamming is the ONLY solution. You would think the nerds of /. would think of ways they would get around being blocked -- some nerd will get paid huge $$$ or be forced to help organized crime or wealthy criminals to circumvent anything. The ONLY thing that can not be circumvented is total radio jamming.
If you catch radio with fencing and special wall treatments-- somebody will find a tower that reaches above the walls; or find somebody willing to put a cell repeater up a hill or tower or flying drone a few miles away but well placed.
Flying drones in/out of prison is another issue which is only going to get worse... but jamming will mess most of those up as well. Then you also have to think about sat phones-- which will get bigger as a response... I frankly don't know why a mob boss isn't smart enough to pay some nerd to make a mini ham radio or some custom radio that uses other frequencies.
My local prison has always had troubles with the low paid guards allowing or helping illicit trade of goods. At least things would be slower and less accessible with guard message forwarding.
Keep in mind, lesser criminals should be in separate buildings where outside access is not forbidden. Also, charging that kind of money for phone allowed phone calls is just inhumane.
captcha: vilified
Gosh, you mean a system that charges $15/minute for a phone call resulted in a black market? How shocking! Anyone who reads that story and doesn't understand how to fix the 'problem' is far too concerned with profit over access to phones. Drop phone prices to something reasonable, or free, and the only people smuggling phones (and covering for people smuggling phones) are the people who want to use them for actual criminal purposes. Until then, every inmate, no matter how much a stooge of the prison authorities, is going to offer as much cover and assistance to phone smugglers as they can. That's just human nature - something the folks who run prisons apparently have absolutely no understanding of.
This solution is stupid. One big 45W jammer will cause disruption in areas outside of the prison, while still having many spots inside where a signal is available. Here they opted for small jammers in every 2-3 cells. Basically like how you deploy wireless access points. There is no degradation at all outside of the prison, and even in the staff areas the disruption is said to be minimal (mostly 4G being slower but still working).
The idea of taking all real world factors away from someone to make the them better able to do with it is a base problem with society. Extinction is to good for their species.
Prisons consider phone calls to be a money fountain. Basically, they are squeezing money out of prisoners trying to keep connections with family.
Many many studies have shown that the single thing that is most important to reducing recidivism is that the prisoners have ties to family and community OUTSIDE of the people they meet in prison. So, basically, the main effect of high cost of phone calls home is to INCREASE crime.
The whole bit about criminals running criminal enterprises with cell phones is mostly a distraction. The prisons want to delete cell phones purely because their monopoly on phoning home makes them tons of cash. If criminals were running criminal enterprises on cell phones, the solution would be a wiretap.
from the article: Cellphones are prized because they allow inmates to avoid privatized jailhouse phone and visitation services that charge up to $15 for a two-minute call home to friends and family. "Inmates call their mothers like most of us do on holidays," said Dr. John Shaffer, former executive deputy secretary for the Pennsylvania Corrections Department.
... Stingrays and electronic sweeps, close-range, won't find cell phones?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As long as there's a profit to be turned from putting people in jail, guess what...more and more people will wind up in jail.
The world would be a better place if those turning a profit from incarcerating non-violent criminals were held accountable for the damage they've done to society and forced to spend the rest of their lives in the institutions they created.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How to cut down illegal cell phone calls? Use the cell-phone-signal blocking devices. Easy solution; effective solution. BUT, and Thanks-to-the USA-Federal-Government's-Forwarding-Thinking-Congress-and-past-POTUS, also illegal. Why does the Federal Government stick it's nose into every area of our lives.
At least these inmates aren't using their cellphones to start a nuclear war with North Korea via Twitter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Jamming communications that allow contacting emergency services lands you straight in federal prison.
I'm pretty sure my government wouldn't extradite me for such a trifle, but okay..
Prison is a place where a lot of normal rules and liberties are suspended, so how hard can it be to get a legal exception here?
So what they want to do is mandate firmware for all phones to allow them to disable, complete, all functionality of a phone. We have only their word that they won't disable *MY* phone, or *YOUR* phone, that they won't accidentally read off the wrong IMEI and disabled Trump's phone..
And here's the way around this: buy your prison phone from Europe, or Asia, pop a US SIM in it, and you're good to go. Asia, in particular, has low cost phones that won't observe any firmware "shutdown" commands as they are made for use outside of FCC jurisdiction.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Come back when it's 3 or 6 cellphones per inmate and we'll show you what a problem is.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Block cell phones from connecting. Solved in one.
They have a completely locked-down environment and they still can't control it? Really?. There are so many obvious solutions to this problem.The fact that this is even an issue can only be either utter incompetence or blatant corruption. Either way someone badly needs to get fired.
Actually, I think there was a drive toward rehabilitation in prison from the 60's to the late 80's, especially at the federal level. They claimed three purposes of incarceration; the three R's: Restraint (I'm not robbing more banks while I'm locked up), Retribution (punishment to help victims feel closure and serve as a deterrent to other), Rehabilitation (changing me so I am less likely to break the law after my eventual release).
Restraint clearly works. I robbed 0 banks during the entire time I was in prison.
Retribution seems to work. I can't tell you how many people have told me they have always wanted to rob a bank but were too scared of the punishment.
Rehabilitation pretty much left the federal system in 1987. Reagan and a couple of Supreme Court decisions effectively removed both the expectation and the reality of rehabilitative efforts. They gutted the the programming available to inmates, which had been quite extensive in some places.
easy fix.
if caught with a cellphone, kill 'em and be legit harsh doing it.
don't be shy just gut 'em like a fish.
let them bleed out on live TV.
torch the corpse after, on the spot, so the smell reminds the next ones of what awaits.
zero tolerance.
bonus: hey trumperoo ol buddy ol pal, annual Purge should be a real event. c'mon. it'd be *so* much fun! make 'hacking' great again! lol lol lol
captcha: biteme
In the prisons I was in, it would be extremely hard to seal the facility. There were extensive outdoor areas and there were civilian residences and roads in the immediate vicinity. It would be hard, though not impossible, to draw those lines at the carrier level. For example, I passed through Federal Penitentiary Atlanta, which is literally inside Atlanta.
Even worse, inmates could spoof the GPS in the phone to move its precise location a little bit to be on the other side of the line.
I think a simpler answer is to put direction finding scanners in the facility and triangulate devices that make connections (obviously whitelist staff phones). Then have the Goon Squad bum rush the area where the phone is and strip search everybody. This is something that the guards are actually kind of good at. When the confiscation rate gets high enough and the cost of getting access to phones gets high enough, the problem will mostly go away.
Unfortunately, this requires spending money on new systems (not more barbed wire) and more actual work by administration and corrections officers.
And according to the 80-20 power law, 20% of your prisoners experience 80% of the total injustice and punitive "piling on" and we have already identified nearly half of that group.
(You think when you are already underneath two 300-lb linemen, well "what's one more?" and "ooooof" you had no idea a ruptured spleen could hurt that much—especially two days later, while the whistle-toting coach continues to prevent you from consulting with a qualified team doctor.)
Sheesh, even the most myopic libertarian knows that coercion is properly the power of the state, to be exercised by the state, with responsibility to the state (and not the bottom line).
Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch" — June 2016
The worker "safety" margin in the shareholder-first privatized system is about an order of magnitude more "intimidating" to the work force than a properly run prison, and the average hire is about half as well equipped to manage these decisions.
That's not the only phone story. This "article" is about a half-day read, and still I recommend the whole thing.
Real journalism. A great fit alongside your collection of tubes and vinyl for any retro hipsters out there with a sixties conscience. (If you've been freshly fished from the Juicer section of the cryogenic deep freeze, here's a carrot tip: a modern cellphone is like Kirk's communicator, but with less flip action, and it also comes with a tiny screen on which you can play Breakout or Dig Dug for as long as your thumb will bend.)
Turns out it's pretty hard. Don't think they haven't tried.
Best of all, these guys learn all about playing with their buttholes since that's the only place they can hide the phones. Now you understand the market for slimmer phones! As these guys "graduate" from prison, expect an explosion in dildo sales. l0l
Install a tower that will intercept all local traffic, and implement a whitelist that will only allow approved numbers and phones. All telcos must come on board with this, it is one of the costs of being allowed to do business in the USA.
Why not just execute them?
I like the way you think.
And the circle is then complete :).
Calhoun State Prison had a big cellphone problem, at least from 2011-2013. They probably do today. A lot of the phones in the prison were sold by guards at huge markups. A $25 flipphone would go for $400, a proper smartphone, more like $1k.
All payments were made with greendot numbers.
They're used for business and pleasure. Inmates are not talking to family all day long! They browse the Internet, have fun, get on Facebook, flirt with fat girls to try to extort them out of money, that kind of thing. They use them to track prisoner transfers so that the gangs know where members and enemies are going, and when.
The prison phone system has very little to do with their popularity. That's a red herring! Make the prison phones FREE and you would still have all the cell phones in there, all the time. Guaranteed. Why? Because you can't get on Facebook using the blue phones! Nobody likes those damn things, no matter what the cost. Only a committed few used them. I doubt they're much of a profit center anymore.
Phones are central to the greendot economy. You make a lot of big trades in prison with greendots. It's how weed changes hands, how store men do their business, etc etc. Guys with lockers full of commissary, and inmates going into and out of their cells all day looking for 2-for-3 deals or whatever. That's the reality. People on the outside know there's a lot of money to be made on desperation. The same motives that cause phone companies to charge $5 or more for a 15-minute call in prison push people to sell phones, weed, and other products to inmates, using the greendot economy. All they need is an entry point. And hell some folks just make that kind of cash selling things that are legal to get in jail, based on the inability of the genpop to manage their finances properly. Some idiot who has no money on his books for one week will rack up a huge debt getting ramen and chips from the store man, so how does he pay? He gets on a phone (acquiring more debt), gets someone from the outside to send a greendot number, and then gives it to the store man and the phone man to split up. They send that money out to someone on the outside, or hell they'll just put it on their books. Some guys get out of jail with thousands of dollars on their books that they didn't have going in. How do you suppose that happens?!? Easy! You have people in the joint piling up debt, paying as much as $100 or more for $60 of already-marked-up commissary. Sometimes they do this to keep a low profile, since they can shop at the store man's cell with greendots and not attract as much attention. If you get money on your books and go to the prison store, everyone gets to see you receive your Jpay receipt at mail time, and they get to ambush you on your way to the prison store if the prison is stupid enough to make people go there in person. Calhoun started delivering commissary to the houses to prevent that, so that you only had to worry about people in your house, rather than people out on the walk.
Anyway, the GDC could have applied for permits with the FCC to operate jammers, or they could just order the local cell companies to run whitelists on their towers. Places like Calhoun all ran off one tower mainly, that you could see out of E and F house pretty easily. It's not like it would be hard. But prison administration would never go for something like that. I think many of them LIKE having all those phones in there, since the low-level guys get to make hundreds smuggling in phones, and then they get paid a bounty by the court system for every successful conviction of possession. So the sucker inmates pay to get them in, and then pay again when they lose them. Say hello to an E-class felony with a 1-year sentence if you get caught and prosecuted!
So do they actually smuggle phones in, in peoples butts? Are their specially designed phones that fit? OR specialty Goatse level mules? Or do they just bribe guards to sneak them in?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
where the fuck did I say it was local and state prisons that need the policy? the policy needs to come from a department that can override existing laws, e.g. the homeland security.
This is not news, it has been going on as long as there have been cell phones.
Current prison systems are way outdated; check out true rehabilitation with http://www.criminon.org/.
Cellphones smuggled into prisons -- enabling inmates to order murders [...] have also played a role in breakouts, with one South Carolina inmate dialing up drone delivery of wire cutters and cash for his escape in July.
Yes, but was the delivery completed in 30 minutes or less? If not, it should be free.
All prisoner areas are FARADAY CAGE. Common areas, that are monitored are not, like day rooms But prisoner cells, turn them into faraday cages. No signals in or out. But...they won't be able to listen to music, or this or that. So? Stay out of trouble and you don't have to worry about it.
It seems to me that walking up and down the hall with a handheld device will show you almost exactly where these wireless devices are. Find the hot zones. Come back later and toss the cell (room, not phone). Use the phone as evidence to figure out other crimes being committed.
Seems pretty simple to me.
Also, as others have stated: Faraday cage.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
False on all counts. More self-delusion at work.
Every time I see a post claiming all problems stem from a profit-making prison system I can only wonder who is paying them to spread such lies. Probably the Russians and maybe the Chinese. They have such large prison populations and know the problems with troublemakers in the populous and must desire to see more chaos in the US. No prison system makes a profit. They all cost big-time.
The cellphones in the prisons are just part of the Democrats free bread and circus for their base.
THAT's the problem with Americas prisons
I would love to see an article explaining how we got to be the number 1 nation in imprisoning people.
There's 10s of thousands of articles out there on the War on Drugs, take your pic.
The real problem is our inability accept facts and logic. Eliminating drug abuse by forcefully stopping it wasn't an entirely unreasonable thing to try, especially back then when the issue wasn't well studied. But it's 100 years now since the first drug prohibition, and >40 of the modern War on Drugs. It has been demonstrated beyond any doubt that no matter how harsh the penalties, even the death penalty for drugs some countries have, prohibition does not work. Anybody can get any drug they want, even in maximum security prisons. Our 4th Amendment rights are nearly dead largely because of this. Loads of other rights are seriously damaged. Police becoming heavily armed soldiers with us as the enemy are a consequence of this. You might be able to justify all that, and the millions upon millions of lives ruined, and the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, if it was eliminating or seriously reducing the harm drugs cause to society... but it unequivocally is not.
Drugs like cocaine, heroin, and meth have horrific consequences when they're abused; to the user, to their family, and to society. Since eliminating them is absolutely never gonna happen, we should instead pick the policy that minimizes the harm caused. Most people are simply incapable of accepting that criminal prohibition instead takes these very harmful substances, and increases their harm by orders of magnitude, and strips everyone of their civil rights.
If you want to:
-Minimize the number of addicts,
-Minimize the number of ODs,
-Minimize acquisitive crime (property crime to raise money),
-Minimize violent crimes,
-Maximize opportunities for people with abuse issues to get help,
Then you have to provide tightly regulated, but legal, access, to all drugs. There's been extensive studies on this, it's not some random idea, it's a thoroughly studied and validated fact. Use does not increase. Portugal decriminalized all drugs for personal use; use went down. Turns out there's not loads of people saying 'gee, I sure wish heroin wasn't illegal, I'd try it otherwise'; something compounded by the fact the people most likely to develop an abuse issue are the least likely to be deterred by legality. All of the money currently spent on prohibition would instead go to education, prevention, and treatment- every dollar spent on that reduces drug abuse more than a dollar spent on prohibition. The money taken away from violent criminal organizations would completely cripple them. There'd be more cooperation with police who weren't constantly breaking down doors and shooting dogs, or sexually assaulting people on the side of the road with cavity searches (seriously, google roadside cavity search). There'd be less harassment when police couldn't bump their numbers with petty drug crimes.
It's a hard fact to swallow, because you see the damage drugs can do, and desperately want that to never happen. But since that's impossible, you have to instead mitigate. However bad you think a given drug is, prohibition makes it worse. Whenever you say "Well, $x shouldn't be illegal because $y", $y is made worse, not better, by keeping it illegal.
I don't get it, apparently shopping centers can snoop on your every move using your phone. They should either use that tech or catch them out with the new iNmate app.
Having counseled prisoners in the past, I can tell you that the only way phones get smuggled into prisons is via Prison Guards.
(drones? yeah, probably 1 in 100 gets smuggled in that way).
You see, people visiting prisoners go through a search process, run by the guards. Guards on the other hand... they go in and out all day long.
So, it is the fucking crooked guards who run the prisons. Pay to play is the name of the day. Believe it.
You don't jam. You use a fake (or real) tower to grab the signal, like a Stingray.
Technology cannot solve Social problems
Casteism
Are they making a serious effort to solve the sodomy problem in US prisons?