The Worst Prisons in the U.S. Have the Most Smuggled Cellphones
Reading Time: 7 minutesWhat makes illegal tech worth the risk in prison?
Over the past few years, contraband smartphones have given people behind bars a way to have entire lives online. Videos shot from inside prisons and posted to social media help incarcerated people bring attention to their living conditions, but they also use contraband tech for many of the same purposes as people on the outside. Though having a contraband cellphone could incur punishments—like being sent to solitary confinement or even criminally charged—more and more prisoners seem to be risking the consequences.
On Sunday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Keri Blakinger, a criminal justice reporter for the LA Times and author of Corrections in Ink, about why many incarcerated people risk the consequences in order to use contraband cellphones. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lizzie O’Leary: You wrote an article, published by the Marshall Project, titled ‘The Many Ingenious Ways People in Prison Use (Forbidden) Cell Phones.’ What are some of those ways?
Keri Blakinger: Some guys are taking online classes and just straight-up posing as regular free-world students. Their professors might not even know what they’re doing. Some people do stupid TikTok dances. Some people write books and self-publish them on Amazon. Some people sell their own artwork. There’s one person that I talked to who used it to do ministry work when there was lockdown and they weren’t able to get out and do that sort of work in person. And there’s some people who are in systems where the medical care is so pitiful that they’re using WebMD to self-diagnose and then buying black market antibiotics accordingly to treat the problems because they can’t actually get help from medical. There was another prison where apparently the cellphone use was so brazen that sometimes guys would call the front office, and be like, ‘Yo, send a guard back here, there’s something going on.’
How are incarcerated people getting phones in the first place?
That varies a little bit based on the specific facility. One of the main routes in a lot of places is through the staff, because this is not the kind of thing that it’s very easy for visitors to smuggle in—you have to go through metal detectors, and the actual visiting area doesn’t necessarily allow for those kinds of handoffs. So it’s often staff, sometimes the guards, sometimes the civilian staff. And that’s particularly true, for instance, in Texas prisons. I think every instance that I’m aware of, of people having contraband phones in Texas prisons has come from staff. In theory, it could also potentially be coming in through the back gate if trustee inmate workers are involved in some sort of phone ring. But that has not actually been the way that I’ve been aware of phones getting inside in Texas. Then, in a place like the Bureau of Prisons and Federal Prisons, drone drops are also a common way of getting cellphones in.
How does a drone drop work?
So somebody flies their drone and drops it onto the roof or somewhere onto the prison property. Where exactly you can drop it depends on the property, the amount of surveillance, and the extent to which the guards care if they even spot a drone. In some places they’ll care, and in some places they’ll just be like, ‘Whatever.’ If it’s a system where people have enough freedom of movement to go outside and retrieve a bag of materials, they can do that. And that’s not something that is easily done in a higher security Texas prison.
You have an interesting theory about which prisons have the largest number of illicit phones. Can you explain that?
This is sort of impossible to prove, but just from the dozens or I guess probably hundreds at this point of people that I’ve been in communication with contraband phones over the years, I think that the prison systems that have the most phones are also the ones that are in the worst shape. For instance, Georgia prisons might very well be the worst in the entire country, and they have incredibly open use of cellphones to a degree that I have not seen in other states.
But then in someplace like New York or Colorado, phones are far more rare. They exist, they’re in some facilities, but they’re just not as common as they are in some of the really broken Southern prisons. I think that this is partly because some of the same factors that would lead to the introduction of contraband phones also correlate to the same things that make a prison bad. If you’re extremely understaffed, living conditions end up being a lot worse. But that lack of supervision also makes it easier to openly use contraband phones. It also decreases the chance that the guards have the time to care. I also think that when you have staff that are underpaid, they are more likely to be trying to hustle by smuggling in contraband phones, and they’re also less likely to generally care about their jobs.
How much does it cost to get a phone in prison?
I have heard phones going for as little as $200 or $300, but I think more commonly they’re in the $800 to $1,500 range. On the upper end it’s like $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. And these are smartphones. Typically not iPhones, but at least smartphones.
Where’s the money coming from? It doesn’t go through a commissary account, of course.
Some people are using CashApp, things like that. Some people are trading for them, but usually the sort of initial purchase or initial dealings involve someone on the outside that can help orchestrate these things. Then, once someone has a contraband phone and can access their own money from that phone, it becomes a lot easier to keep it going.
There’s also the role of gangs. In some of the prison systems, gangs are a big force in the contraband phone trade. Gangs sort of ensure a continuity of the contraband flow because it means that there is a structure in place even if one person leaves. So maybe the one guy who is really into getting in phones leaves, but there’s still a whole gang structure that’s in touch with whatever corrupt guards are participating and that has access to the money.
I’ve noticed that you keep saying ‘guys.’ Is this not happening in women’s prisons?
I have never spoken to someone in a women’s prison with a contraband phone. The only woman that I’ve spoken to was a trans woman who was in a men’s prison. I think that that’s because in general, women just don’t get the types and variety of contraband that men do. Part of that is because broadly, prison gangs are not as pervasive as they are in men’s prisons. And, because gangs are so involved in a lot of the cellphone purchasing and distribution, the lack of gangs is also connected to the relative lack of contraband in women’s prisons. I also think that part of this is that women are scared of losing access to their kids. Something like 80 percent of women in prison have kids, and the threat of losing those visits and losing that contact weighs heavily on mothers.
Some of the prison TikToks I’ve seen have screen names on them, which seems like a way for someone to track you down if they wanted to. What are people risking by doing this?
The consequences vary widely. Some states don’t really do a lot. They can’t necessarily put people in SHU—solitary—if they don’t have enough SHU space. And other places, if you get caught with a cellphone in federal prison, they have plenty of SHU space and they’ll transfer you to another prison to put you in SHU for months. They won’t typically file criminal charges, although in some states they very much will. In a lot of places when there’s enough contraband phones in the system, it becomes a lot harder to discipline people for them because you run out of SHU space and you can’t criminally prosecute every one of these cases or you would overwhelm some of the local DA’s offices.
Whether the phones are being used for drug trafficking or whether they’re being used for an online course, in the eyes of a prison, is it all the same?
In their eyes, you’re still breaking the law, and it doesn’t matter why you’re breaking it.
Have you thought at all about where the pandemic fits in this equation?
In the early days of the pandemic, in a lot of prisons, they locked everyone down, they didn’t have visits. And in a lot of situations the guards didn’t want to do cell searches, either, because they didn’t want to get near the inmates. So in the first six months or so of the pandemic, it was a lot easier for people to hang on to whatever contraband they had.
I also think that in the first few months of the pandemic, it felt really apocalyptic to a lot of people in prison. They were looking around at so many people around them either dying or being so sick that it looked like they would die. I think that made a lot of people willing to throw caution to the wind and start going live on Facebook from in prison or start TikToking, things like that. Just saying, ‘Fuck it. I think we’re all going to die. I want the world to know what’s happening.’
Before you were a journalist, you served almost two years in New York state on drug charges from 2010 to 2012. While smartphones were obviously popular then, they weren’t as ubiquitous or as cheap as they are now. What do you think it would have meant for you to use a phone while you were in prison?
One of the things that I didn’t fully appreciate until afterwards is the way in which you completely lose touch with cultural currency during the time you’re in. There were entire dramas and controversies and things that people would reference years later that were just a complete black hole for me. I had no idea this major news event happened. Even 10 years later, I will occasionally hear a song and be like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool new song.’ And then I fucking Google it, and it came out while I was in prison. It wasn’t new.
I know that that lack of cultural awareness seems trivial, but I think it’s actually hugely important for people who get out because it’s really hard to have conversations with people and relate to normal humans when your whole experience is prison. I had no awareness of so many news events or songs, TV shows. None of that. I think that’s actually really important for re-entry. That stuff is the way that you have safe common ground with other people when you get out. You can’t be like, ‘Oh yeah, I can totally relate to that. That reminds me at the time my friend stabbed this dude in the mess hall.’ But if you have other cultural things in common, like TV shows, like what’s happening in the news, like what’s on Twitter, all of these things help you relate to other people in a normal way, and I think that makes re-entry easier.
And maybe cellphones bridge that gap a little bit?
Exactly.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/02/smuggled-phones-prison.html
Ref: slate
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