Cell phones a concern in prison cells

Let’s suppose someone smuggles a cell phone into a prison — they’re worth about $1,000 on the black market in some hard-core lockups.

Maybe the inmate with the phone wants to escape, so he takes covert photos of the fences and alarms, or even a video, and sends the images to accomplices outside.

Perhaps the inmate makes a deal for someone to drop off illegal drugs he’ll sell to other prisoners.

Or maybe the inmate uses the phone to call and threaten someone who testified against him — or to get someone to beat up the witness.

Not good scenarios, which is why Larch Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison five miles east of Hockinson, is one of 15 prisons in Washington that are working to find contraband cell phones.

There’s no cell phone service at Larch, which now houses 387 male inmates, said Superintendent Patricia Gorman.

But the somewhat remote area may get cell coverage someday.

And a couple of years ago, inmates in the vehicle maintenance shop installed a hidden box for a cell phone under a work-crew vehicle.

Larch’s inmate work crews, which deal with forest fires and other problems around the state, could have driven the vehicle to an area with coverage and made calls.

Although contraband cell phones have been used to commit crimes from inside prisons in other states, no illicit cell phone has been found at Larch, Gorman said.

But some of the other 14 state prisons reported finding as many as three in the past two years, Chad Lewis, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, said in a newsletter.

As for the Clark County Jail, officials said they were unaware of any cell phones being smuggled in.

“I don’t ever recall having a problem with cell phones,” said Jail Chief Jackie Batties.

New smaller cell phones, many of which can send e-mails and access the Internet, are easier to hide and considered more dangerous in inmates’ hands, officials said.

By contrast, when inmates use the prison’s phone system, officials can listen in and trace or block calls, Gorman said.

Custody officers also can do pat-down searches of incoming work crew members and, if there’s suspicion of contraband, do a strip search. They also can search a prison cell and inmates’ belongings.

If a phone is found, Gorman said officials now have several options, such as transferring problem inmates from coveted jobs and taking away their “good time,” a credit that can result in early release.

Here are three steps prison officials are taking to make facilities safer, according to Lewis’s newsletter:

n Training dogs to find cell phones.

n Considering tougher punishments for inmates caught with cell phones.

n Looking into new technologies including signal scramblers.

Inmates typically are transferred from higher-security prisons to Larch when they are nearing the end of their sentences, in hopes of using training programs to better usher them back into society. Currently, Larch is being remodeled to handle 480 male inmates, and there’s talk of later changing it to an all-female prison.

John Branton: 360-735-4513 or john.branton@columbian.com.