Cell phone in prison
by Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson
For years, prisoncrats have been building momentum behind pushing for laws to authorize installing cell phone jammers in state prisons. A coalition of state attorneys general is pressing for these laws to counter federal laws that presently prohibit anyone except federal officials from setting up jammers.
As with most U.S. politicians, those pushing this agenda are acting in the interest of their corporate donors and political sponsors, who profit from prison telecommunications. In this case, the corporations backing these efforts are the same ones who generate billions of dollars a year from price-gouging prisoners and our loved ones for prison telecommunications.
GlobalTelLink (GTL) and Securus, the two major corporations that monopolize Amerika’s for-profit prison telecommunication systems, are the very corporations who own the companies that make the cell jamming equipment, while prison officials reap millions in annual kickbacks – called commissions – for allowing these corporations to control their phone systems. So, prisoners with cell phone access means a loss of billions in profits to these leeches. THIS has been the main motive behind the drive to ban and jam prisoners from using cell phones.
Prisoners and our loved ones have been bled white by these prison phone industry profiteers, and over the years much ado has been raised in protest of overpriced prison communications that have in some places reached $14 per minute. These protests have led to caps placed on prison call rates by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). (1)
Yet, the expenses of calls still far exceed what people in society pay or don’t pay at all using cell phones. So, to head off public opposition to cell jamming tech, these opportunists have been playing to public fears by demonizing prisoner cell phone use. The propaganda they’ve been using, and politicians have been basing entire campaigns on, sensationalize claims of cracking down on prisoners using cell phones to engage in dangerous criminal schemes. (2) There are so many layers to this bullshit, one could write several books sifting through it.
Foremost, prisoners have a First Amendment (free speech) right to communicate by phone. (3) Prison officials may burden this right if they can show the prisoner has other communication options available to them, which is usually said to be correspondence by U.S. mail. But, of course, one can’t correspond by mail with a young child or adult who is not literate. In which case phone access must be provided. I’ll return to this point in a moment.
What most of us also don’t know is the operators of these phone systems are the actual criminals.
Each time a prison phone call begins with, “This call is subject to monitoring and recording,” a crime is in play – particularly when the parties have NO OTHER OPTION but to use the monitored and recorded line and with people they cannot otherwise correspond with.
Under the federal Wiretap Act (18 U.S. Code §§ 2510 through 2523), intercepting, monitoring or recording any electronic telecommunication without a court order is a crime and civil violation, unless the communicating parties consent to it. The courts have made clear that this law applies to prisoners’ calls as with anyone else’s. (4)
The very reason the automated notification is in place at all, is so the prison phone users can be said to have consented to the monitoring and recording by going ahead with the call after receiving the warning. THIS is how these prison phone profiteers have set up and normalized a system of illegally intercepting prisoner phone calls and getting away with it. But it is still illegal. In fact prisoners actually have a constitutional right to use cell phones. Wrap your head around that for a moment.
It is readily recognized that having one’s conversations monitored and recorded invades one’s sense of privacy and chills free expression, which constitutes a First Amendment violation. But remember, prison officials may violate a prisoner’s free speech rights IF the prisoner has another available option for expression, which they don’t in the case of their young child for example with whom they cannot correspond by mail. In that case, regular phone lines must be provided. Which means cell phones.
In fact, not so long ago, and before prison phone profiteers took over, U.S. prisoners used the same regular phone system as people in society. Prison officials gave us a regular phone, we’d dial “O” for operator, and place an unmonitored collect or prepaid debit call to whomever we desired.
The prison phone monopolies like MCI WorldCom, GTL etc., SEDUCED prison officials state by state to allow them to take over their phone systems with multimillion dollar kickback bribes. The exorbitant phone rates were charged not just to profit the phone companies but to pay the kickbacks to the prisons.
But what went and remains unchallenged is the illegal justification they used and continue to use for monitoring and recording prison calls and now use for the drive for laws to jam prison cell phone access: namely, that cell phones can be and have been used by prisoners to engage in crimes – alleged crimes that pale in comparison to the systematic criminality shown by thousands upon thousands of guards who smuggle these contraband items and illicit and deadly drugs into prisons all over the country. It is well recognized that there is an epidemic of criminality of guards who smuggle in such contraband. These are not just common criminals, but ones in charge of entire law enforcement agencies.
Unlike prisoners, these are PEOPLE WITH POWER who statistically show a frighteningly widespread and common propensity to criminality, which NO ONE in these circles is talking about.
David Reutter spoke to this contradiction in an article discussing the epidemic of prison employees in South Carolina, where I’m presently imprisoned, being involved in smuggling contraband into their prisons, where officials are pressing for jammers. Indeed, South Carolina is one of the states leading the push for cell jammers.
Reutters pointed out: “Left unaddressed in the slew of criminal cases involving SCDOC (South Carolina Department of Corrections) employees is the motivation for guards and other staff to risk their jobs and freedom to smuggle contraband. Wages for guards are so low in some states that a married guard with two children qualifies for food stamps. The line between prisoner and prison employee is apparently a thin one.” (5)
The argument that cell phones in prisons must be banned because of speculations that they may be used by prisoners to commit future crimes is as valid as banning people from being hired as guards because they may use this position to smuggle contraband and drugs into the prisons. People aren’t barred from being guards for these reasons, although hundreds of thousands of contraband cell phones are confiscated in U.S. prisons every year, and even more prisoners are confronted with the systemic cruelty and abuses of prison staff. And why? Well, because the law says that everyone is presumed to be free of criminal inclinations, even those convicted of prior crimes, not the other way around.
A quote from the Virginia Supreme Court is fitting here: “The law never presumes that a man will violate the law. Rather, the ancient presumption is that every man will obey the law. That presumption holds even when one accused of a crime has been convicted of other crimes, and it prevails until rebutted by proof [in a criminal proceeding] beyond a reasonable doubt.” (6)
But of course, as the wave of criminality of prison officials demonstrates, the reality of Amerika is, government officials have no respect for their own laws. Yet they rush to demonize and punish powerless people of color and the poor for allegedly running afoul of the laws.
Not only is the denial of prisoners’ uses of the phone systems that are available to the general public unconstitutional, but the push to install cell jammers has nothing to do with stopping crime and everything to do with the ongoing exploitation of prisoners and our loved ones by prison phone monopolies, with the attendant damage to our family and community relations by the systematic denial of our ability to simply communicate with loved ones.
Why indeed are cell phones in such high demand in the prisons? It is because, like all humans, those imprisoned who have been cut off from society and often shipped hundreds of miles away from family and community, are social animals and have the natural and powerful drive and need to communicate with those they love, and to develop and cultivate new relationships. Whereas in Amerikan prisons, as during chattel slavery, officials continue to maintain a slave system that thrives and profits on separating families and shipping them hundreds of miles away from loved ones, and destroying the targeted poor communities, all in the name of enriching a senseless and insensitive greedy few.
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
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Endnotes:
1. In the Matter of Rates For Interstate Inmate Calling Services, 35 FCC Red. 8485 (F.C.C.), 2020 WL 4669748 (August 6, 2020)
2. Mike W. Ray, “Citing Escalating Threats, States Seek Permission to Jam Cell Phones in Prisons,” SOUTHEAST LEDGER (April 1, 2025)
3. See, for example, Washington v. Reno, 28 F. 3d 1093 (6th Cir. 1994)(holding that telephone access is part of the First Amendment right to communicate with family and friends); Johnson v. Galli, 596 F. Supp. 135, 138 (D. Nev. 1984)(“no legitimate governmental purpose to be attained in not allowing reasonable access to the telephone,…such use is protected by the First Amendment”).
4. U.S. v. Green, 842 F. Supp. 68, 71 (W.D. N.Y. 1994)(“18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521 (‘Title lll’) generally prohibits the intentional interception of telephone communications in the absence of a court order. This prohibition extends to prison communications”).
5. David W. Reutter, “South Carolina: Former Prison Employees Charged, Plead Guilty in Contraband Investigation,” PRISON LEGAL NEWS (February 2020), pp. 20-21
6. WTAR Radio-TV v. Virginia Beach, 216 Va. 892 Va. 892, 223 S.E. 2d 895, 898 (1976)
