When John Moriarty, inspector general for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice testified before Congress yesterday in support of legislation to permit cell phone signal jamming around prisons, he offered some insights into the problem of phone smuggling to prison inmates.
Moriarty told legislators phones are usually carried into the facility by corrupt employees or contractors; dropped in a location to be smuggled in by inmates or concealed in packages shipped into the facility.
Search procedures enacted last fall, after a death row inmate threatened a state senator via cell phone, include pat searches, metal detectors and x-rays, but "inmates and corrupt employees in some cases have changed their operational techniques by resorting to secreting the devices in their body cavities in order to get past the search procedures," he said. "Conducting body cavity searches is permitted only under extreme circumstances due to the intrusiveness of the search. This search technique is not taken lightly and persons involved in smuggling also know this."
The cost to have a cell phone smuggled inside a prison ranges between $400 and $2,000, he said. Perhaps most startling was his comment that his office has "developed evidence that money from foreign nationals involved in the anti-death penalty movement was utilized to facilitate some of these organized smuggling operations."
Source: DallasNews.com, July 17, 2009
