There is a new bill that will come to the California Senate floor for discussion either today or tomorrow.
It seeks to outlaw the possession of cell phones in California state prisons. The bill, AB 434, is sponsored by California State Sen. John Benoit, and will make getting caught with a cell phone a misdemeanor crime with a penalty of a $5,000, and a small amount of time added to the inmates’ sentence. It will also make it tougher for the prisoner to get paroled.
Look: I think we can all agree that prisoners should not have cell phones.
Yet like many pieces of law-and-order legislation, this one sounds good at first glance, but there are problems when you start looking under the hood.
For one thing, mobile phones are already considered contraband and carry a misdemeanor penalty. If a prisoner is caught with one of the things, it will be confiscated, the inmate will lose privileges, and will be fined $1000. (Plus he wil likely end up paying a visit to the hole—aka solitary confinement.)
Fine. That’s as it should be.
But do we really need to further criminalize having the phones by making the misdemeanor larger?
According to reports by the Senate Public Safety Committee, it is unlikely that prison visitors are the primary people smuggling in phones—mainly because visitors have to go through metal detectors.
There is, however, plenty of evidence of that staff and/or guards are smuggling those phones and then selling them at a tidy profit. The CDCR has caught them doing so.
The sales pitch on the bill is that prisoners are primarily using the phones to plan escapes and crimes on the outside.
Certainly a small percentage of prisoners use cell phones for all the nefarious things described. And before cell phones showed up, that same small percentage was successfully plotting their evildoings through collect calls and other forms of communication.
In fact, most inmates want the phones because it is by far the cheapest way to call their families—since collect calls from correctional institutions are exorbitantly expensive, a burden that falls on the wives, husbands, mothers, and kids of prisoners.
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UPDATE: I wrote extensively here and here about the huge profits being made off the calls from jails and prisons—by the state of California, the County of Los Angeles and, mostly of course, by the phone companies that have the fantastically lucrative contracts, which at the moment in California would be Global Tel Link.
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I get a lot of prison calls, so I’m familiar with the absurdly high costs—over $3 for the connection, and an unpleasant chunk of change for every minute thereafter. (And, yes, I’ve gotten some of those not-so-legal cell calls.)
So how about this. Make the cell phones even more illegal if you must. But how about then lowering the usurious rates for the collect calls?—since nearly every prisoner recidivism study suggests that the biggest predictor of how well a prisoner will do on the outside is the strength of his or her relationships with family and community.
One more thing, as I mentioned above, if inmate is charged with this new misdemeanor, (no trial is necessary), he/she can be fined up to $5,000. If he is in prison for any length of time, penalties and assessments may be added, driving up the fine to several times the original $5000—like say $19,000 according to one advocate.
Unless the prisoner’s family pays the fine, it will be hanging over his head when he is released, further hampering his ability to succeed and upping the probability that he will soon land back in prison on our dime—making expensive collect calls to his family.
So, fine, put bigger teeth in the no-cell-phone prohibition. But then make it easier for inmates to call home through legal means.
It is a sad situation. It’s odd that the correctional system treats inmates like cattle, but then we the public expect them to come back to us as better people who’ve learned their lessons.
It seems that the logical way to clamp down on this – which strikes me as certainly one of the lesser “evils” that exist in our prison system – would be to increase the penalties for anyone caught smuggliing them in. With even sharper punishment if that person “happens” to be an employee of the system.
reg: With even sharper punishment if that person “happens†to be an employee of the system.</i.
A crime is a crime, and the position of the person doing it shouldn’t determine a harsher punishment.
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Is the high costs of calls due to a profit incentive, a lack of concern over costs, or bureacratic inefficienies?
Actually Woody, that’s not the case. It’s clearly a worse crime for someone tasked with responsibility for enforcing laws and regulations to break them than it is for the average citizen. They are not just committing a crime but also violating the public trust and the terms of their employment. It’s a “two-fer” that makes their act deserving of greater sanction than, say, someone’s girlfriend trying to smuggle in a cell phone.
This is pretty basic. It’s actually the “conservative” position. (But then you’re not a conservative – just a mindless racist, reactionary fuck blowing smoke out of your ass to get attention.)
How’s a guy supposed to call out for pizza or Chinese? What’s the system coming to when inmates convicted of felonies and sentenced to serve time are deprived of their basic rights? Is this America or Siberia? Are they incarcerated in a penal institution or some gulag? Basic communication should be the right of every man be he inmate or free man.
It’s the “conservative position,” reg? I didn’t know that conservatives had some place like liberals telling all other conservatives how to think. You forget, conservatives act as individuals whereas liberals have to be led.
If people in trusted positions deserve worst sentences, then why is Geithner, who cheated on his taxes, over the IRS rather than in prison?
This conservative is also against “hate crimes” in which a sentence is tougher if believed to be against a black or gay person. A crime is a crime, no matter who does it or why.
When sentences are categorized by who committed a crime or why and made tougher for some, Obama’s thugs will make crimes by conservatives have sentences three times longer, especially those by dangerous terrorists like homeschoolers, thanks to Janet Napolitano, who has labeled as terrorists just about anyone who supports moral causes, wants freedom from government tyranny, and opposes high taxes.
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I think it’s awful that inmates have to pay delivery charges when they order something from Home Depot or Ikea, because they can’t pick up the items themselves.
Are you as stupid as your last comment makes you sound ? I guess you’ve proved that persistently here.
Thanks Celeste for posting this; Joe made an interesting comment here- society expects our inmates to return to society better & REHABILITATED than when they first went in- the sad thing is Joe, there MUST be sensible programs, and rehab available for that to happen. When you cage a dog, abuse him physically & mentally then medically neglect as well as keep him caged for 23 hrs out of a 24 hr day, feed him unhealthy food- then suddenly release that dog- what happens? Think about it- thats what California is doing to those 170,000 inmates we warehouse. Who wants that dog running loose in their neighborhood? Sentencing & Prison reform, much needed as long as we continue to mass incarcerate.
I think every inmate should have a cell phone. How else am I supposed to keep in touch with all those strong, buffed, naughty inmates?
Can someone tell us the revenue that has been going to prison pay phones now going to smuggled cell phones? I have a hunch the scary press releases about murders and drug deals being done by smuggled cell phones are motivated by phone companies that don’t want competition.