Recently, I stumbled upon an article via Gizmodo about banning cell phones in prisons. New legislation in Congress will classify cell phones as contraband, possibly even ramping up possession of one to a felony charge. What’s going on here?

There are two sides to the story. On one hand, smuggled cell phones are used to orchestrate criminal activity from within prison. On the other side, cell phones are a significantly cheaper and more sensible alternative to maintaining contact with families outside of prison, as opposed to calling collect all of the time. Of course, each side has some hidden activity going on beneath the surface.

From the “cell phones enable crime from behind bars camp” is the idea that possession of cell phones by inmates is dangerous. If an offender has been imprisoned for the sake of debilitation and occlusion from society, then there is some weight to this. Since collect calls can be monitored and personal cell phone calls essentially can not, the concern that a particularly dangerous inmate could orchestrate unsavory events via a cell phone is indeed a valid one. Jammers are expensive, ineffective, unconstitutional and can also block radio signals, but what about the idea of constructing prisons as intentional Faraday cages?

For the physics-unintiated, a Faraday cage is a construction of conductive material designed to block wavelengths of a certain size or larger. The metal housing of a microwave oven forms a Faraday cage (even with that see-through grating on the front) that prevents radiation from traveling outside of a microwave, the frame of your car forms a Faraday cage that protects you from lightning strikes, and yes, the steel structure of some buildings is why you don’t get cell phone service indoors (often warehouses that are made almost entirely of metal). It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to design a prison and even an outdoor prison yard that would act as a Faraday cage to block incoming and outgoing cell phone signals. Outside of relatively minor costs, the only downside would be that guards wouldn’t be able to use cell phones either; they’d have to resort to hard lines to communicate with the outside world from inside the Faraday cage.

As for the “calling collect is a terrible way to communicate with family” camp, that’s a fairly valid argument as well. Who really calls collect these days besides inmates, anyway? No, the real barrier here is the profit-sharing contracts that prisons will enter into with telecommunications companies. Companies will sign agreements where they get exclusive rights and also get to charge exorbitant collect calling rates in exchange for cutting the prisons in on a deal. Doesn’t that sound a bit like the exact sort of thing the government is supposed to prevent via anti-trust laws?

In order to keep families and inmates in touch, it would make sense to install a few hard lines that simply had unlimited long-distance. I mean, I get enough mailbox spam from Comcast practically begging me to sign up for Digital Voice for something like $20/month and I’m sure there are plenty of similar programs out there that prisons could set up for menial rates. Choosing to go the route of high collect calling rates and siphoning that money into the prison system (via commission) from the communities that inmates come from and where their families live is just plain unethical. It’s like tacking on an economic penalty for keeping in touch with someone who gets incarcerated! Communication and maintenance of outside bonds is critical to prisoner rehabilitation upon release and charging communities to help make that happen is a completely backwards approach to reforming anyone.

I don’t see why it’s impossible to install cheap, simple Faraday cages (or something similar that would render cell phone use impractical or impossible) and cheap long-distance phones in a place where calls could be monitored if necessary. Furthermore, I think it would be prudent to ban these prison/telecomm contracts, even more so than tacking on felony charges for simple cell phone possession. It really seems like the federal government is probably taking the wrong approach on this one.

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