One wishes this was a parody:
Inmates aren’t allowed to have cell phones in any US prison, let alone on death row. But the 21st century’s ubiquitous communications tools are nonetheless turning up by the thousands in lockups not just in Texas but across the US and around the world. Last year alone, officials confiscated 947 phones in Maryland, some 2,000 handsets and accessories in South Carolina, and 2,800 mobiles in California.
The presence of cell phones is changing the very meaning of imprisonment. Incarceration is supposed to isolate criminals, keeping them away from one another and the rest of us so they can’t cause any more harm. But with a wireless handset, an inmate can slip through walls and locked doors at will and maintain a digital presence in the outside world. Prisoners are using voice calls, text messages, email, and handheld Web browsers to taunt their victims, intimidate witnesses, run gangs, and organize escapes—including at least one incident in Tennessee in which a guard was killed. An Indiana inmate doing 40 years for arson made harassing calls to a 23-year-old woman he’d never met and phoned in bomb threats to the state fair for extra laughs.
“Cell phones,” says James Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association, “are now one of our top security threats.”
Talking to his own security threat, Whitmire stayed calm, hearing out the prisoner’s complaints. He noted Tabler’s number, then promptly called John Moriarty, the Texas prison system’s beefy, mustached inspector general, asking how the hell an inmate had gotten hold of a cell phone in what is supposed to be one of the state’s highest-security lockups.
Moriarty’s people subpoenaed the records for the phone that had dialed Whitmire. They were astonished by what they found: The device had logged more than 2,800 calls and text messages in the preceding month. At least nine other prisoners had used it, investigators say, including members of such notorious gangs as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Crips.
In response, on October 20, Texas governor Rick Perry ordered every one of the state’s 112 prisons locked down and all 156,000 inmates searched. Officials found 128 phones, including a dozen on death row, as well as scores of chargers, batteries, and SIM cards. That brought the total number of phones and related items confiscated from Texas prisons in 2008 to more than 1,000.
We know that in our prisons all sorts of crime goes on – drugs, prostitution, rape, murder…it all happens in the places in America which are supposed to be the most controlled. It is becoming entirely clear that our prisons are run by the prisoners, and its time we stop this – not just because of the threat to people outside prison, but because we have a moral responsibility to ensure the safety of those we incarcerate.
Prisons should be changed from the places they are now into places which are (a) safe and (b) places no one wants to go for any reason. Not only should there not be cell phones, there shouldn’t be any phones…or television, or radio, or snack foods…there should be a cot, a can, bars, beans and bread…miserably boring work and only Sunday’s “off” in the sense that you don’t have to do the miserably boring work on that day. Prisoners should be monitored – from remote sites no accessible to the prison personnel – by audio and visual sensors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the recordings kept for years. Not one moment of privacy, not one word un-recorded, not one chance for the prisoners to plan anything.
This would, of course, suck – but prison isn’t supposed to be anything other than bad…and it would stop prisoners from being able to harm others or themselves while incarcerated.
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