By William Jackson
GCN
PARCHMAN, Miss. — It’s hard to keep a bad man down. The Government Accountability Office reported that in 2011 a federal inmate was found running an identity-theft ring from prison using a contraband cell phone. Federal and state prison authorities have confiscated thousands of illegal phones in the past few years, and the Federal Communications Commission and correctional officials say their use poses a public safety risk.
But keeping them out of prison is a challenge.
“You can try and try and try,” said Sean Smith, head of Mississippi’s Corrections Investigation Division. “But offenders have 24 hours a day, 365 days a year—366 days in a leap year—to figure out how to beat you. It became a security nightmare.”
Phones are smuggled in by staff and visitors and thrown over the fence. “We implemented efforts to stop that, but we couldn’t be 100 percent,” Smith said. “So we thought, if you can’t stop them coming in, how can you prevent their use?”
Jamming the phones is illegal and impractical, Smith said. “I’m inside the unit, and sometimes I need to make a call.” Technology to detect them is not always effective, and once they are identified it can require a confrontation with an inmate to confiscate it.
So in 2010 Mississippi became the first state to implement a managed cellular access system at its state penitentiary at Parchman. “It’s working good,” Smith said. “No technology is 100 percent, but we cut it to an acceptable rate,” and both the number of intercepted transmissions and the number of confiscated phones has dropped inside the walls of Parchman.
Its pioneering use of managed cellular access is only the latest claim to fame for this storied prison. It is located on U.S. Highway 49, just 20 miles from its crossroads with Highway 61 in Clarksdale where blues singer Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, according to legend. Since its founding in 1901 it has housed quite a few well-known blues singers (Booker “Bukka” White, John “Big Bad Smitty” Smith), has been the subject of a number of blues songs (“Parchman Farm Blues”), and was the site of many recordings by folklorists John and Alan Lomax now housed in the Library of Congress.
Full story: Prisons get a new way to stop inmates from using cell phones