Cell phone presence in prisons provokes calls to jam signals

When prosecutors revealed last month that a Baltimore man accused of using a contraband cell phone in jail to order the killing of a witness was again caught with an illegal phone behind bars, the judge's jaw dropped. He couldn't fathom how this keeps happening. It's "amazing," said U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett.

But jail administrators will tell you it's not. Cell phones are smuggled into prisons in Maryland and around the world by the thousands through visitors, corrupt guards and, in Brazil, carrier pigeons. They're thrown over barrier walls, carried in body cavities and delivered by UPS. Inmates use them to run drug operations, intimidate witnesses, plan their escapes, harass victims' families and pass the time, calling girlfriends and grandmothers without fear of officers listening in. A single jail phone, passed from one inmate to another, can rack up thousands of calls per month.

Correctional officers in Maryland and elsewhere have boosted efforts to fight the proliferation, which has worsened as phones have cheapened. Maryland pioneered using K-9 dogs to sniff out the devices and recently toughened fines for those caught introducing contraband. But the dogs and officers can't keep up with the smugglers, and prosecuting them is often a low priority.

There is something that can kill the problem in an instant, though: signal-jamming technology. It crushes communication and makes the phones useless, proponents say.

"That would be the ultimate," said Gary Hornbaker, assistant commissioner of the Maryland Correctional Pre-Release System and head of all Baltimore region Division of Correction facilities. "We wouldn't have to worry about [cell phones] at all. It would save time and money for all of us."

But it's not being used by anyone except a few federal agencies because the Federal Communications Commission says such signal interference is banned under a 1934 law, enacted when cell phones weren't even a fantasy and land lines were in less than half of the country's households. That means the president's security detail can jam signals, but jails can't.

Bills before Congress aim to make cell jamming legal in prisons, and they've got a strong list of supporters, including the American Association of State Correctional Administrators and Gary D. Maynard, secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. He's on a list of potential witnesses for a bill hearing next month.