By Tim Redmond
The hottest contraband in prisons these days isn’t drugs or weapons. It’s cell phones. The California Department of Corrections is pushing for stiff criminal penalties for cell phone possession:
“Cell phone smuggling into California’s prisons is a very serious and growing problem. Public safety officials in prisons and prosecutors on the outside need additional tools to combat cell phone smuggling to inmates,” said Matthew Cate, CDCR Secretary. “Illegal cell phones are used to circumvent supervision of conversations, and can be used by inmates to orchestrate criminal activity, plan escapes, and be a menace outside of prison walls.
There’s state legislation. There are cell-phone-sniffing dogs (seriously, cell-phone-sniffing dogs). There’s a lot of press fuss, and almost all of it has focused on the possibility that crimes can be committed from inside prison wall with cell phones.
But let me suggest some other reasons why the CDC might be trying to ban these handy little devices. For one thing, forcing inmates to use incredibly expensive, overpriced pay phones is quite lucrative for private vendors and state and local government. Inmates who have cell phones can call home without forcing their loved ones to pay huge collect-call charges.
I called the CDC today to ask if revenue has dropped since cell phones started showing up in prisons, and spokesperson Gordon Hinckle said he’d get back to me if that information was something the notoriously secretive agency might be willing to release. Of course, he said, “By no means is that any reason why we’re trying to crack down on this.”
And then there’s the fact that cell phones have cameras.
Imagine if the routine prison-guard misconduct — the beatings, the abuse, the violence — that goes on in state prisons could be captured by inmates and sent to the outside world. Imagine if the next Oscar Grant turned out to be a prison inmate, say, someone denied medical care or beaten near death by the authorities.
You think the wardens and the prison guards’ union wants any chance of that ever happening?
I get the point about the crimes and the potential for problems. But I also think there are plenty of inmate who are just serving their time and aren’t parts of gangs and aren’t plotting assassinations and who might have slightly better lives if they were allowed to communicate more cheaply and freely with the outside world.