When you get sent to prison you don’t get to bring your cell phone, but many prisoners are finding ways to get cell phones and this is becoming a problem. Cell phone use by inmates is used to run criminal activity like drug trafficking and gangs. They can also be used to intimate people on the outside; those who are supposed to feel safe once someone is sent to jail.
As with other prohibited goods, getting cell phones for and to inmates has become a big black market. Attorney General for the State of New Jersey, Anne Milgram, said yesterday that thirty five inmates have been indicted on charges of possessing phones and that N.J. needs to start to target this problem and seek extended jail sentences for those prisoners that are caught “dealing” phones.
Yesterday, Attorney General Milgram asked state lawmakers to further increase the penalty for cell phone possession, which since August 2007 has been considered a third-degree crime punishable by up to five years in jail. No joke.
Corrections Deputy Commissioner Lydell Sherrer agrees with Milgram, saying “I think it’s critically important that we send a very strong message. We have not consistently seen individuals getting as much time as I think they should.”
This may be harder than it seems, because as with anything that is prohibited, people, in this case prisoners, always find a way to get what they want. Cell phones are frequently smuggled into prisons; inmates hide them in books, laundry, mattresses, etc. Sometimes different parts are placed in different areas to make the phone itself harder to detect.
Milgram said New Jersey is thinking about using technology to locate cell phone use in prisons, but this is known to be expensive and not necessarily that effective. As with drugs, perhaps dogs can be trained to sniff out cell phones.
Cell phone use is not a right that prisoners retain when they are sent to jail, but they do retain other rights, which companies like JPay.com help maintain. For example, the right to stay in touch through prisoner email, the right to send a prisoner money through money transfers, and the right to see and speak with an inmate even if you cannot be present at the actual jail, through video visitation.