Drugs were once the contraband of choice of prisoners. These days, corrections officials across the country are on the lookout for a more high-tech scourge — cell phones.
Cell phones have been used to help at least two inmates escape from minimum-security conservation camps. Prison investigators fear they also are being used by gang leaders to order assaults on other inmates and employees and to coordinate the timing of prison uprisings.
Richard Subia, California’s associate director for adult prisons, called cell phone use in state prisons “one of the most severe security issues that we have right now.”
It’s been a problem in prisons across the country.
A condemned inmate in Texas used a smuggled cell phone to make a threatening call to a state senator in October. Authorities say a drug dealer behind bars in Maryland used a phone to arrange to have a witness assassinated outside his home last summer.
In Kansas, a convicted killer sneaked out of prison after planning the 2006 escape using a cell phone smuggled by an accomplice. The following year, two inmates escaped another Kansas prison with the help of a former guard and a smuggled cell phone.
California prison officials confiscated about 2,800 cell phones statewide last year, double the number discovered the year before. Inmates can be punished for having them but have found ingenuous ways to hide them.
Guards have found duffel bags full of cell phones hidden near prison fences and in garbage sacks thrown over prison walls. Unscrupulous guards looking for a quick buck have brought them in by the dozens to sell to inmates.
Officials in California and other states are lobbying for a Federal Communications Commission waiver so they can use jamming devices to disrupt cell phone signals inside prisons. The effort has been unsuccessful so far.
Connecticut, Virginia and Maryland are using cell phone-sniffing…