US Lawmakers Propose Allowing Prisons To Jam Signals From Smuggled Cellphones (apnews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Federal legislation proposed Thursday would give state prison officials the ability they have long sought to jam the signals of cellphones smuggled to inmates within their walls... The legislation could help provide a solution to a problem prison officials have said represents the top security threat to their institutions.

Corrections chiefs across the country have long argued for the ability to jam the signals, saying the phones -- smuggled into their institutions by the thousands, by visitors, errant employees, and even delivered by drone -- are dangerous because inmates use them to carry out crimes and plot violence both inside and outside prison.

Comments

They should have been doing this all along.

[Anonymous Coward]

Prisons have no need for wifi or cell phone signals. Anything that isn't DOC approved should be blocked and it should have been done since this was possible. There is virtually zero downside here. Prisons are prisons.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[Anonymous Coward]

Before cell phones there were letters. Seemed to work fine. Also, there are approved phones available in every prison. I see no need for a prisoner to have a way to bypass prison restrictions on communication. In fact, I see a lot of downsides to it.

But, congratulations if you got your life together.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[ShanghaiBill]

There is virtually zero downside here.

Actually, there is. The prisons make it difficult for inmates and families to use the legal phone system.

The charges are exorbitant, and the hours and rules are burdensome.

The phones are usually controlled by a for-profit contractor, looking to squeeze out every cent they can.

The contractors, prison system, and guards unions actually benefit from increased recidivism that is strongly correlated with weaker bonds between inmates and their families.

Prisons are prisons.

Most inmates will eventually be released. They may even be your neighbors someday. So social alienation may not be the best policy.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[Smallpond]

Financial repercussions from confinement are not solved with illegal cell phones.

They are when the phone company charges $2.80/minute for collect calls. Oh, and the prison gets a cut, which is the real reason why they crack down on personal cell phones.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[ShanghaiBill]

So making phones more available to inmates would solve the issue.

Partially yes. Illegal cell phones are a bad solution to the problem of social alienation. But they are better than NO solution, and turning them off while the larger problems with our prisons haven't been fixed should NOT happen.

America's prison system is completely dysfunctional. We spend far more than any other country on prisons. Per capita, America imprisons more than four times as many people as China, Russia, or Iran. Yet we have far higher recidivism rates. Our prisons are factories for crime, and the people running them are actually incentivized to make them worse.

Even within the US there are dramatic differences, with the states spending the most having the worst outcomes. This cell phone jamming is just more knee jerk "get tough" nonsense that has been an unmitigated failure.

Let's fix the prison phone systems, so any prison who has not abused the privilege can have unlimited access to phones and internet. Once that is in place, sure, ban the cellphones.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[Lesrahpem]

Before cell phones there were letters. Seemed to work fine. Also, there are approved phones available in every prison. I see no need for a prisoner to have a way to bypass prison restrictions on communication. In fact, I see a lot of downsides to it.

But, congratulations if you got your life together.

You have a point, letters do work fine for most things. However, the GP is also correct it might take the perspective of someone who has been an inmate to understand this issue. Let me try to elaborate on the real issues surrounding phones in prison.

The phones inmates have access to aren't very useful, and can actually be dangerous. In a typical situation, there may be 4 phones for 400 inmates. They're first-come, first-serve so there is usually a line or crowd around them. Other inmates can and will use things they overhear against you, so it's not safe to discuss anything you wouldn't feel comfortable having written on your shirt. This also means making a call at any specific time or date isn't practical, and calls are frequently cut short by others.

Like everything else in prison, this creates a black market. Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone. He stole food and condiments from the kitchen and sold them to other inmates to pay for his phone use.

Most people who use a smuggled phone in prison aren't using them to commit or plot crimes. It's more often about having privacy communicating with family, friends, etc. I've known a few people who had legitimate businesses on the outside, and used a smuggled phone to continue running their business.

Rather than blocking phones it might make more sense to issue each inmate a phone the prison can monitor. The whole situation around the payphones they provide drives a lot of violence and crime simply because there aren't enough of the phones.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[rtb61]

You have been isolated from the rest of society because of your problematic behaviour and isolated to a controlled environment the purpose of which should be you rehabilitation. That isolation includes communications, you should not be able to communicate with anyone without their prior approval and the approval of correctional services and those communications should be monitored to ensure rehabilitation is occurring. You are in, what is meant to be, a school for delinquent adults, where you will be treated like an irresponsible child and taught to behave like a responsible adult, you have zero right to initiate communications without supervisions with those outside the correctional facility and they have every right to be protected from your communications, just as they are now protected from direct phsyical constant with your person.

Jamming would be bad because the correctional services facility has no right to interfere with communications outside of it walls. So prisons walls need to be rendered and in that render a wire mesh to disrupt all communications, no need for mobile in prison at all, land line serves fine and not privatised either but part of the rehabilitation process.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[ixuzus]

Zero downside - really? I thought this was a tech site. Do we now have miracle jammers which stop at property boundaries now? I drive past a jail with a jammer fairly regularly and it will kill phone calls from a kilometre away. Beyond that there's an area where calls will get through but the signal is definitely degraded. It's a big problem when you have a minor accident and an older driver who is having bad chest pains. I had to flag someone down and ask them to drive up the road a little bit to call for an ambulance and then I had no idea whether they had bothered to make the call. I hate to think what it would be like with a severe accident where minutes counted.

Unless the jail is in the middle of nowhere jammers are a bad idea. You don't get to screw with people who aren't incarcerated because you can't handle your contraband problem. If they're smuggling phones in that's not all they can smuggle in.

people, process, technology.

[pointbeing]

You don't deploy technology to address a people issue.

Re:You're a liar, Bill.

[dryeo]

The problem that the AC seems to state is a shortage of legal phones, thus making illegal phones more important.
There's been multiple stories here about how prisons handle phones, they charge a fortune and have a shortage of phones.
Better would be reasonable access to phones for the prisoners.

Not everyone's best interests

[rsilvergun]

if you run private prisons it's not in your interest. You want them back.

Re:Entitlement

[SuricouRaven]

Because making prisoners suffer is a great way to win votes, but a terrible way to rehabilitate prisoners. The more you isolate them from the outside world, the most they will connect with their new friends inside. You just end up making a system where people can enter prison for petty theft or possession, and leave with an invitation to join one of the local gangs and no hope of a legitimate job.

Prison-owned cellular provider

[DesertNomad]

Yet another incredibly unthinkingly lame idea from those who don't understand technology.

Far better to put a captive cell network in the confines of the prison and capture the cells inside the compound. If it's a friendly cell, and one known to be that of a worker, who can be checked for possession at any time (like send a text that has to be replied to with a specific, changing personal code), let the call go through, maybe. Or it gets routed to the prison IT group. If it's an unknown cell, or otherwise suspicious, let the call go to /dev/null, or maybe even better yet, have it go to a random robocall center!