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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."
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.
More of the idiotic one line posts from this turkeydance moron. Why doesn't this clown get modded down? The real problem here is using prisons as a source of profit, one part of which is the excessive cost of making phone calls. Lower the costs and much of the problem will go away, since many of the prisoners using cell phones for benign purposes will lose the incentive to acquire them. If prisons aren't a source of profit, that also removes the incentive to send people there for longer sentences and crimes that really shouldn't result in prison time. As usual, turkeydance has it wrong with his worthless post. Sure, the hardened criminals may still smuggle in cell phones, but most of the problem will go away if prisons stop trying to be profitable and charging excessive prices for phone calls. It also decreases the potential that a cell phone gets smuggled in for a relatively benign purpose and then ends up in the hands of someone with more nefarious goals. Lower the prices of phone calls and mod down turkeydance. Problem solved.
This is what you get when you privatize prison system.
and in case you haven't heard yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, just, no. The problem is the for profit prison system. For a supposedly free nation, we incarcerate a lot of people. It's a shame none of our elected officials grasp this concept. It's gotten to the point where our own system is so corrupt that many of the folks in power should be in prison. My definition of what constitutes criminality has changed in response to our elected leadership. It's amazing how closely tied the definition of crime is to socioeconomic status.
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.
>"The problem is the for profit prison system. For a supposedly free nation, we incarcerate a lot of people. I[...] It's gotten to the point where our own system is so corrupt that many of the folks in power should be in prison"
I agree that too many people are incarcerated and for too long (for those without violent crimes. Incarceration was supposed to be about rehabilitation, that was lost a long time ago. But that concept was lost long before "profit" prisons. If the metric for profit were shifted to people safely released without recidivism, that would change everything.
Years ago I spent some time incarcerated in an Ohio prison (my life's changed since then, I just want to point out I have a certain perspective about this).
Most of the phone use I witnessed or heard about was just so people could make reasonable phone calls to family. Picture this: You've got 6 pay phones in a block housing 500 people, and the phones are only open for about 4 hours a day. It's Thanksgiving and the line to use the phone stays 30 people long. Fights happen over the phones. I have seen someone beaten by another inmate because he was on the phone for too long.
To add insult to injury it cost like $2.50 to make a phone call, and then about $1.00 a minute and the phones would disconnect and drops calls all the time (if I remember the prices correctly).
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.
The problem is the for profit prison system.
About 8% of US inmates are in private for-profit prisons.
South Carolina, which the TFA says has the worst problem with cellphones, has no private prisons.
Oklahoma, listed as the second worst, does use private prisons.
For a supposedly free nation, we incarcerate a lot of people.
America's incarceration rate is about 4 times the first world average.
Incarceration rates vary widely by state, and increases in the incarceration rate are not positively correlated with reductions in crime. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate. Maine has the lowest.
Inmates that have regular communication with their families and friends have lower recidivism rates, and have fewer disciplinary problems in prison. Making phone calls and visits more difficult is very stupid public policy.
They aren't in prison to be tormented, but to be kept from society for society's sake. It's called a justice department, not a vengeance department, and they aren't rehabilitating anyone.
Everyone has basic instinctual requirements: healthy food, exercise, sensory/information input, family, social connections, & safe housing. The US prison system is a recreation of hell on earth, as that's what many if not most of the US religious population is projecting. When you do this to people, restricting their mindset to a high scarcity environment, they become animals, driven by instinct and lower thought levels.
The US prison system majorly serves to create a criminal animal slave force, most of who shall be returned to rejoin our society, and continue their aggression against the rest of us, for lack of a better way.
In this way, the US prison system is similarly criminal, in that it espouses violence and deprivation by force, a supreme hypocrisy, and ensures that those they have been given responsibility for will near certainly enact further violence against the people upon release.
Our Hell on Earth of a justice system is producing demons and releasing them into our communities. Maybe we should actually provide an okay environment for those we lock away for years? Maybe we should rehabilitate them, instead of dehabilitating them, before allowing them to return to us? Don't forget, many are innocently locked away.
TFS says that most of the smuggled cell phones are just used to circumvent the expensive prison landlines, which means that any attempt at finding, removing, or monitoring smuggled phones will have to deal with all of that benign chaff.
Just allowing the prisoners to talk to their families and girlfriends for a reasonable cost would mean that most of the phones smuggled in would be the ones used to commit crimes. Finding, removing, or monitoring their use now becomes both a worthwhile and a more manageable task.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.
Present evidence for that, please. The drastically lower incarceration rates there suggest to me that they're not having to re-arrest people as much. Norway is the country best known for having comfy prisons, and it looks like their recidivism rate is 20% compared to the USA's 36%: https://www.researchgate.net/p...
Of course it's very hard to find useful stats to compare since the nature of the crimes involved varies by country.
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I think you're missing something here. A lot of the people incarcerated right now are in prison for non-violent crimes. There are definitely people who've done something terrible and can't be rehabilitated. More of the people incarcerated are in prison because they did something non-violent because they were in a bad situation and made a bad decision.
For example, I knew a guy who was a union construction worker who made very good money for honest work. He got injured at work and the doctor prescribed him opiates for the pain until he could get into surgery. By the time he finally got in to have the problem fixed he was addicted to the pain meds. The doctor stopped the medication. For anyone who isn't aware, once a person is hooked on opiates the withdrawals are worse than the worst flu imaginable.
This guy started seeking illegal opiates. He wasn't doing it to get high. He was doing it so he wasn't too sick to go to work and provide for his wife and 2 kids. Does this guy really need to be in prison for drug possession? Can we really say this guy doesn't need some kind of rehabilitation and we should just kill him?
I realize this is kind of a straw-man argument, but as a society we have to understand our justice system as it exists works like this. There are plenty of people incarcerated who are still valuable humans who made bad decisions for respectable reasons. When we write them all off as the worst 1% we are doing ourselves a disservice.