No cell phone bars behind bars

By Abigail Goldman

Monday, July 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Inmate Jody Thompson struck up a romantic relationship with a prison dental assistant, who in turn gave him a token of her love — a cell phone. Two weeks later, Thompson used that smuggled cell phone in his escape from the state prison in Carson City. It was three months, two robberies and a few high-speed chases later before he was back behind bars.

That was autumn 2005, but Thompson’s tale was recounted in the nation’s capital just last week, during a Senate commerce committee hearing legislation that would allow the jamming of cell phone signals in state prisons — an illegal technology that prison officials from 26 states, including Nevada Corrections Department Director Howard Skolnik, are petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to allow.

The petition Skolnik signed was filed two days before the Senate hearing, where those in favor of the legislation pointed to Thompson’s case and others like it as evidence of the need for jamming devices, which render cell phones useless by interfering with their radio frequencies.

Those against the idea worry the technology isn’t precise enough to ensure phone frequencies used by people making everyday phone calls or calling 911 won’t be affected.

While these points are being debated, Skolnik says, an unknown number of phones are in the hands of Nevada inmates. This despite a 2007 Nevada law that made bringing a cell phone onto any prison property a misdemeanor. And giving an inmate a phone is a felony.

Although neither Skolnik nor prison spokeswoman Suzanne Pardee was able to give a precise accounting of phones confiscated from inmates, the prisons director said there have been “a handful” of cases.

Skolnik would not detail the methods inmates have used to smuggle phones into facilities or how they keep them hidden, though he did describe incidents of phones being tossed into state prisons by accomplices on the outside.

At the Senate hearing Wednesday, it became clear that opportunistic corrections employees pose the greatest risk when it comes to contraband phones, simply because of the money to be made in the illicit trade. Texas state Sen. John Whitmire spoke of calls he received direct from a death-row inmate who purchased a cell phone from a prison guard for $2,100. That same phone, it was later determined, had been passed among multiple inmates who collectively talked for thousands of minutes.

In Nevada, at least four corrections employees have been reprimanded for having phones on premises, according Dennis Mallory, chief of staff of the Nevada chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents detention officers. Skolnik remembered only one employee being disciplined, but said several staff members had self-reported that they had accidentally brought phones to work.

The dental assistant who gave Thompson his phone, Ana Kastner, was arrested and given a suspended sentence. She is the last employee known to have given a phone to an inmate. Of course, it takes only one motivated employee to introduce several phones into the system, Texas Criminal Justice Department Inspector General John Moriarty said Wednesday. Moriarty recalled one prison investigation that revealed Texas inmates were prepared to pay $400 for a phone.

In California, the profit potential was too hard to ignore for one prison employee, who told the Sacramento Bee last year he made an extra $100,000 smuggling phones to inmates. The Bee also reported that at least half of the 2,800 phones confiscated from California inmates last year are thought to have been smuggled in by employees.

Jamming the phone signals, U.S. Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska noted, is really just “solving a problem which is a symptom of another problem” — employees looking to pad their salaries. Moriarty acknowledged this during the hearing, as Skolnik did later to the Sun, and both prison officials came up with the same reason: History has proved it’s impossible to police thousands of corrections employees.

“Chances are that some of them will have an issue personally which would be tempting for them to find an additional source of income,” Skolnik said.

The answer, both men said, is jamming the signals.

Absent the authority to do that, some states are using dogs trained to sniff out cell phones, and others are exploring technology that seeks out cell frequencies so corrections employees can track them back to the source. The concern is that hard-wiring that kind of system into prisons is expensive and less effective than jamming, so Skolnik is waiting to see whether the FCC ban, which has been in place since 1934, might be lifted for prisons.

Thompson, the inmate escapee who Skolnik and others agree prompted Nevada’s prison cell phone ban, meanwhile, is housed at maximum-security Ely State Prison and looking again for love — at least according to the Web site convictpenpals.com, where a letter written by Thompson was posted late last month and reads, in part, “I’m a team-player. I like teamwork and what it stands for. Living, loving, elevating, and succeeding together with people I love — this appeals to me.”

The site does not list a phone number.