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EDITORIAL: Electronic prison wall
[April 18, 2012]

EDITORIAL: Electronic prison wall


Apr 18, 2012 (The Record - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- State prison officials say that last year they confiscated 15,000 cellphones, more than a 10-fold increase in five years.

The phones -- like other types of contraband such as drugs and alcohol -- are slipped into the states 33 lockups in various ways. Guards bring them in. Contractors bring them in. Visitors deposit them on prison grounds and they're picked up later and secreted inside.



The draw is money. Those bringing them in are paid thousands of dollars by inmates, their families or their fellow criminals on the outside. Once inside, the cellphones can be used for criminal activity both inside and outside the prison walls.

When people bringing them in are caught, they are arrested and prosecuted. While not a state prison, last fall a San Joaquin County Jail corrections officer was sentenced to a year in jail and five years' probation for secreting a phone into the county jail for an inmate.


Since he was paid only $200 by the inmate's girlfriend and it cost him not only time in jail and probation but his $81,000-a-year job, his was not the brightest career move. Still, it shows the nature of the problem.

State prison officials said Monday they have a no-cost solution. They've awarded a contract to Global Tel Link to provide inmate telephone service. The company will receive revenue from the service and use proceeds to install systems to block unauthorized cellphone signals.

In tests last year at two prisons, more than 25,000 unauthorized signals -- calls, texts, emails and attempts to connect to the Internet with a smartphone -- were blocked over an 11-day period for about eight hours a day.

During that time, signals from nearly 2,600 unique wireless devices were detected.

It's good to see corrections officials moving on this problem, although the speed of their action is puzzling given that signal blocking technology has been available for years.

It's also good that this -- at least according to corrections officials -- won't cost taxpayers anything. On that last point, we'd advise taxpayers to withhold judgment.

___ (c)2012 The Record (Stockton, Calif.) Visit The Record (Stockton, Calif.) at www.recordnet.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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