Cellphone jamming system tested at Maryland prison
COLUMBIA, S.C. » Federal prisons officials on Wednesday tested a jamming technology inside the walls of a federal prison, a rare move that authorities said they hope will help combat the danger posed by inmates with cellphones.
The test was conducted over several hours Wednesday morning at a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, Assistant Attorney General Beth Williams told The Associated Press as the testing took place. Williams didn’t give specifics of how the test worked but said it marks a step in the fight to cut down on inmates’ ability to communicate unsupervised and carry on with criminal efforts.
Similar tests occurred in 2010, but Williams said Wednesday’s effort was significant because jamming technology has evolved, as have inmates’ efforts to smuggle in the devices. Such tests, she said, could lead to the broader use of technologies like jamming inside prisons to immobilize inmate phones, which officials across the country have described as their No. 1 security threat.
“Today is a big step, and the reason really is that, as criminals increase their capacity to commit crimes behind bars, we have to increase our capacity to stop them,” Williams told AP.
The renewed interest in jamming within federal facilities follows an announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who told a national meeting of corrections officials that federal prisons would start testing the technology anew.
“That is a major safety issue,” he said in his speech. “Cellphones are used to run criminal enterprises, facilitate the commission of violent crimes and thwart law enforcement.”
The federal Bureau of Prisons, which houses 185,000 inmates, confiscated over 5,000 cellphones from inmates in 2016, Williams said, and preliminary figures show that number rose last year.
For years, officials in state and federal prisons have spoken out about the dangers posed by cellphones in the hands of inmates, who can use them to continue their criminal endeavors behind bars, including drug trafficking, extortion scams, and even hits on witnesses and others.
Last year, South Carolina Corrections Director Bryan Stirling testified at an Federal Communications Commission hearing in Washington alongside Robert Johnson, a former South Carolina corrections officer who was nearly killed in 2010 in a hit orchestrated by an inmate using an illegal phone.
In July, an inmate was able to escape from a maximumsecurity prison in South Carolina, thanks in part to a smuggled cellphone. Jimmy Causey was recaptured three days later in Texas.