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]

This is actually a terrible idea, but it takes the perspective of having been a felony inmate for a multiple-year bid.

What really happens with prisons is that there's a financial incentive to encourage recidivism. This means providing only enough services to receive state and federal money, but not enough to actually lower the recidivism far enough to put the prisons out of business.

If it weren't for an illegal cell phone, I would have been unable to keep my finances squared away and get out with a solid base of support, ready to work and meet my obligations--because I'd been meeting them all along. I experienced first-hand the difference that effective communication makes to staying out of the system: it's of paramount importance.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it weren't for an illegal cell phone, I would have been unable to keep my finances squared away" - 100% separate issue. Financial repercussions from confinement are not solved with illegal cell phones.

Your case does not make a mandate for all prisoners having access to illegal cell phones even if in your case as you claim it reduced your inclination. It's not a general rule, cell phones reducing recidivism.

Re:They should have been doing this all along.

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy whose never interacted with the system. Lawyers will advise you to take care of your finances before incarceration because you generally can't do it while incarcerated. The explicitly prevent you from doing so. For those who might have child support or other legal obligations they don't disapear just because you have been incarcerated. When you don't pay that child support they will take away your passport and your drivers license which then makes it even more difficult to get a job. Not to mention most employers won't hire an ex-con to begin with. No. The system is designed to ensure the existence of an underclass for the benefit of a few. It's called the prison industrial complex. Slavery was not entirely abolished. There is an exception for prisoners and some states even rent out there prison labor. Until fairly recently that was the solution to the problem created by abolishing general slavery and unlike the prior system the new system didn't protect the prisoners. Those who worked the prisoners didn't care if they died so they'd overwork the prisoners. Unlike in the old system where a slave owner had an interest in that slave continuing to produce the rental of the prison population had no incentive to treat the prisoners adequately.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

A prison unit with 75 to 150 inmates will have maybe 5 phones available. Usually at any given time 1 to 3 of those phones will be damaged and repairs might take a month or two to get authorization because it's not a priority. Then you have the fact that inmates can't just use those phones whenever they want, they are given blocks of time during the day/evening that the phones are turned on. You might have phones available from 1pm until 8pm and everyone has to use the very few phones available during that time. Prisons have an internal inmate hierarchy and if you are way down the list the prisoners running the show may or may not let you use the phone.

When or if you do get to use the phone you better hope the person you are trying to call will be in their office and available to talk to you. If not there is no system for them to call you back on, those phones are outgoing calls only. You can't do many of those things through the mail because it would take a week to ask a question and get an answer, then your follow up question based on the first reply will take another week and cost money for postage. Friends can't handle your private business for you even if they wanted to. Most of the time family can't unless it's your spouse or you have given permission legally for another person to take care of things for you. That is pretty complicated and not free in any way.

Being in prison is the punishment. You are locked up for X months or years and can't leave. You are told when to go to bed and get up. You don't get to decide what you eat for your meals. You don't get to make any real decisions about your day to day life during the time you are imprisoned. That is the punishment handed down by the courts.

Prisoners should have access to prison installed land line phones when they need them to handle personal business. It should be monitored and recorded just like all communications in and out of the prison unless it's with a lawyer. But they should be able to handle their financial obligations and take care of the things they need to keep up on in order to have a chance at springing back to a normal crime free life after they are released. Anything else should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. It's setting them up for failure and that is the opposite of what temporary incarceration is for. Also once a person serves their time, including parole, they should not have to tell potential employees or anyone else they were convicted of a crime. If they have paid their debt to society for their past criminal activity it shouldn't follow them around.

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.

[SuricouRaven]

It depends on country, but in the US it's common practice for prisons to charge seriously excessive prices for even those basic services. Phone calls can cost a few dollars per minute, depending on prison.

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.

Their own cell tower?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should just put up their own cell tower and intercept all calls and triangulate the call and go get the phones.

Re:Their own cell tower?

[fahrbot-bot]

They should just put up their own cell tower and intercept all calls and triangulate the call and go get the phones.

Um... Wouldn't that need three towers? :-)

Re:they should all be supermax

[Anonymous Coward]

23 hours a day in your cell. 1 hour of exercise.

So like you in your Momma's basement but with exercising?

Geofencing

[Anonymous Coward]

Jammers are messy. Why not just have wireless providers geofence prisons and deny service. They already have triangulation capabilities.

Re:Geofencing

[SuricouRaven]

They don't have triangulation. They have cell identification. Easy enough if the prison is in the middle of nowhere, but a surprising amount are within cities* - cut them off that way and you also cut off all the surrounding buildings.

*Often they were build just outside of the city, and the city then grew.

Re:Jam a cellphone up my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

You are really dumb.
Just set it to vibrate.

The real danger

[sjames]

The prison payphones charge $10/minute to whoever accepts the call. They don't want to lose those sweet sweet kickbacks.

Re:The real danger

[alvinrod]

The other part of it is that there are people in prison with serious ties to criminal enterprise and the authorities want to be aware of anything that they're saying over the phone. It's a lot easier to spy on everything when it's done through the prison's phone system.

Re:The real danger

[sjames]

They could start with reducing the rates for prisoners talking with family on the outside to normal levels to reduce the non-criminal incentive to smuggle cellphones (including probably many thriving discount phone call businesses run by prisoners).

Ideally, they'd let prisoners freely make monitored calls and set up their own mini-tower to monitor. After all, if the goal is ACTUALLY successful re-integration into society, fostering family ties would be an important step.

Re:The real danger

[guruevi]

The goal of jail is to keep dangerous people away from society, not integrate or become an extension of it. If I go to jail and call on the phone, watch tv, see loved ones, surf the web all while getting a roof, heat, medical care and regular nutritious meals then what's the incentive of staying out?

You get your time, your visitors, phone calls should be part of the visitation times you get. Rest of the time should be reflection in your cell on the decisions made.

If only you could block without jamming!

[Gravis Zero]

It's too bad there's no way to block a cell phone signal without flooding the frequency range it uses! Strangely, I haven't heard Warden Faraday complain about rogue signals. I'm sure he just has the nicest inmates. ;)

people, process, technology.

[pointbeing]

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

Re:they should all be supermax

[JaredOfEuropa]

Why? A prison should serve several functions, only one of them being punishment. How about rehabilitation? Very few prisoners deserve life imprisonment, and it is in everyone's best interest to do what we can to have prisoners re-enter society as best they can when their time is up. You will not accomplish that by treating them like animals.

Re: Jam a cellphone up my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

That phone will get shitty reception.

Entitlement

[Ann Coulter]

Why do prisoners get to have contact with the outside at all? Ban all phones, televisions, radios, visitors, letters, and the like from prisons. The prisons can still profit from the friends and families of the prisoners by allowing them to pay for their stays and meals.

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.

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:they should all be supermax

[SuricouRaven]

"Superpredators?" How do you even define that? If such a thing is even a valid classification, it's going to be a tiny part of the prison population. We all like to think that the prisons are full of murderers, rapists and pedophiles, but it's just not true. Drug offenses make up the largest proportion.

Texting

[BankRobberMBA]

Odd you should mention texting.

There are services that will provide inmates an outside telephone number and will conduct text messaging communication through the CorrLinks system (this is the inmate email messaging system in the feds (I think also in some state prison systems, but I'm not sure)). CorrLinks charges 5 cents a minute for email access and the outside service converts from text to CorrLinks and vice versa.

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!

Re:Prison-owned cellular provider

[PPH]

If it's an unknown cell, or otherwise suspicious,

Track the call to its destination. Turn that information over to law enforcement for further investigation.

All calls to/from prisons may be monitored for security purposes. So extend this to calls involving contraband cell phones in prisons. And make a few organized crime, gang and drug busts on the outside.

Re:Way to segregate the "bad people" even further

[geekmux]

Oh, so all those "people" behind bars are actually victims of the prison system?

Statistically, yes. Or are you suggesting that our criminal justice system is so accurate that the 98% of cases plead out guilty without full due process are all correct?

I'm glad you trust the cops so much.

I don't trust cops as much as I trust myself to follow the damn law, which is the easy way to avoid prison. The definition of victim is rather clear, and if you truly believe that the majority of people behind bars didn't earn that trip inside, you are seriously delusional.

It's rather clear how you end up in prison, and when the other 99.99% of the human race can manage to avoid it, it's hardly a system designed to entrap people unfairly. The main way you end up finding yourself on the bad end of a plea bargain is if you fucked up enough in the first place to get arrested.

Needless to say, my sympathy wanes.