Word: cell
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cell-phone access can mean chaos. Brazilian officials say cell phones are used to organize and plan widespread riots that are endemic to their crowded prisons; Canadian prosecutors said a notorious drug kingpin continued business behind bars using his cell phone; and a man awaiting trial on a homicide charge in Maryland has been accused of arranging via cell phone the murder of a key witness in the case. The examples go on and on, some bordering on the absurd. The mother of a prisoner in Texas even called authorities to complain about her son's bad cell-phone reception...
Most prison cell-phone incidents, however, raise serious security concerns. Texas death-row inmate Richard Tabler allegedly used a smuggled cell phone in recent weeks to make threatening calls to Texas state senator John Whitmire, chairman of a key criminal jurisprudence committee. The calls were among 2,800 made in just one month from cell phones used by Tabler and nine of his fellow death-row inmates. After Whitmire alerted state prison authorities to the calls, the high-security East Texas prison was locked down and searched. Authorities found Tabler's phone hidden in the ceiling above a shower. They...
Even before Tabler's notorious calls, Texas prison authorities were investigating 19 cases of death-row cell-phone use and 700 cases throughout the entire state system. Tabler's mother and sister have been arrested on felony charges for buying cell-phone minutes and equipment for him. But it is not just family members who help smuggle the phones. Prison authorities say guards have been paid $2,000 - more than a month's wages - to bring in contraband cell phones. Small cell phones and postage-stamp-size SIMM cards are easy to smuggle into prisons in body cavities or simply...
Some states, like Florida and New Jersey, have passed new tough laws making cell-phone-smuggling a felony. They are also using cell-phone-sniffing dogs to hunt down the contraband and assigning guards to do metal-detecting wand searches for hidden phones. But Gelinas said South Carolina's prison system is "short-funded" and cannot afford to divert manpower to searches. "It makes much more sense to use the cell-phone jamming technology that's available," Gelinas says. The problem for state and local prison administrators is that jamming cell-phone signals is illegal and available only to federal...
South Carolina is hoping to persuade federal authorities to allow cell-phone jamming. Last week prison officials invited CellAntenna Corp. to demonstrate such technology for state and federal lawmakers. The prison system also invited representatives from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates jamming. The demonstration, however, drew opposition from the cell-phone industry's lobbying arm, CTIA - The Wireless Association, which sent a letter to the FCC urging the agency to block CellAntenna from "brazenly" violating federal law. The association's chief lobbyist, Steve Largent, a retired professional football player and former Congressman...