Cell phones in prison

The report about the call Texas State Senator John Whitmire received from a Texas death row inmate on a contraband cell phone has given widespread attention to the fact that there were a lot of cell phones in Texas prisons, something most of us weren't aware of. It seems that the inmate wanted better conditions -- it gets hot in an un-air conditioned prison. His roughshod approach, not to mention the death threat, didn't exactly fall on deaf ears, and the wide spread crackdown could not have been what he intended.

We don't know whether Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison received any such calls, but she is trying to help eliminate the potential of it happening again with the introduction of the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009, the bill which would allow prisons to jam wireless transmissions in prisons. Click to read her press release.

Some are complaining that a jamming device will jam all wireless transmissions in a prison, not just prisoners' cell phone calls. Others say that the technology exists to detect, identify and manage cell phone transmissions as well as restrict it to a certain subset of approved users. But that's more expensive than merely jamming the signals, and in these economic times, the cheap way will likely be the accepted way.

In the meantime, Texas inmate do have legal access to phones to talk to friends and family. They are limited to two hours a month at a per minute rate of $0.26 intrastate and $0.43 interstate. That's a sounds a bit steep compared to typical outside rates, but at a maximum possible expense of $51.60 per month it's a bargain compared to the $800 a Virginia woman claimed to have paid for one month's phone calls from her incarcerated husband.

But with inmates using contraband cell phones to run illegal operations, order hits, threaten witnesses and any other thing imaginable, then in spite of the complaints, jamming doesn't sound like such a bad thing at all.

In fact, I'd like to have a rear facing jammer for my car so that anyone within a few car lengths behind won't be talking on their cell phones.  Maybe that would have prevented that cell phone talking woman from giving my vehicle an eleven hundred dollar love tap a year or so ago.

Comments

[Rob O.]

Maybe this just shows how naive I am, but I cannot grasp how this could be a problem - how can the prison's management NOT have total control over the environment?!! How the heck are cell phones even getting in there?!!

Hell yes, install jammers - right now!

And while we're at it, perhaps we need to get back to chain gang-style labor for the inmates to keep them too busy to make phone calls. Let's put those idle hands to work on the "Don't Mess With Texas" highway beautification program.

I'm all in favor of running the prisons more like Joe Arpaio runs things in his little corner of Arizona.

[Geo]

Rob O, according to some of the linked articles, a smuggled cell phone is worth a lot of money, and in some cases bribed corrections officers brought them in. That would seem to be a solvable problem, too.