Rhode Island prisons use cell phone-sniffing dog
the ACI. “Cell phones have been linked to inmate plots to harm witnesses, staff or others on the outside,” Wall said in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman David A. Caprio.
Bruce Reilly, of Direct Action for Rights and Equality, a group that advocates for the rights of inmates, said the bill was using “a bazooka for an ant hill.”
Reilly was particularly critical of the potential five-year prison term. Actually escaping from the ACI carries a maximum sentence of three years, Reilly said, two years less than the proposed sentence for having a cellular phone while still in prison. “It seems a little ridiculous,” he said.
Hill writes that corrections officials are most concerned about contraband such as cell phones in the parts of the eight-prison complex that have the most in-and-out traffic, said Nancy Bailey, the corrections department’s assistant director of institutions and operations. Minimum security and the two women’s units, facilities with people on work release who leave in the morning and come back in the evening, are areas of particular concern, Bailey said.
Zeckhausen said of the five phones that have been confiscated, two were from the women’s units and three from people returning from work release. In Rhode Island’s prisons, making phone calls is strictly controlled. Inmates must file lists of phone numbers they want to call: 10 numbers for social calls and 5 numbers for lawyers. Calls to numbers not on those lists, when job seeking or preparing for release, may be made, but they have to be specially requested, recorded and logged.
In general, inmate calls can be recorded, except ones to law-enforcement agencies, lawyers or the state’s courts.
On the federal level, the Senate has passed a bill that would allow prisons to install equipment that would jam cell phone signals on prison property.
The bill is being considered by the House of Representatives subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security.
Bailey said cell phones are one part of the overall issue of contraband.
Items that seem innocuous to people outside have a completely different context in a prison, Bailey said. For instance, stapled documents are banned in parts of the ACI. An outsider might think that’s silly; after all, how serious a wound can you inflict with an inch-long piece of wire.
“A staple in a high-security institution is a problem,” she said. “A staple can jam a lock, block it so you can’t turn a key.” And if a corrections officer is being assaulted on the other side of that locked door, then that staple is a big deal.
Though a coordinated uprising has to be considered, Bailey said she worried more about how a prisoner with a cell phone could exert control over other inmates.
Besides planning criminal activities, a cell phone would be a way for inmates to communicate with family and friends. Such calls are a denied privilege the owner of a phone could use to extort items of value or favors.
In the Texas case, when authorities confiscated the phone — smuggled in by a bribed guard and with minutes paid for by the inmate’s mother — they found nine other inmates had used it to make more than 2,800 calls in the previous month, more than 90 calls a day. “What is of value to us, in an inmate population, takes on a much higher value,” she said.
