The thing is, they weren't small phones. People didn't smuggle them in their colons - they used code systems to arrange for their friends to throw things over the fences in particular places. Mini-riots were organised to coincide with throwovers. Drugs get in the same way.

There were a whole lot of more inventive methods used too. Suffice it to say that the problem is not the size of phones. It's that if you deprive people of their freedom, they spend all their time thinking about how to get it back. They will eventually work out how to get a little piece. Tiny phones won't make the blindest bit of difference.

Firstly, how do you charge a phone? I wouldn't have thought cells had plug points.

Secondly, is there any realistic way of stopping phones getting in? Building higher fences, and putting sensors on them, sounds like one way of stopping throwovers for example.

T

Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up (you have to earn it or have it sent in - it's not free). Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems.

Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment.

I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate peoples desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.

Having thought about it, hand cranked and solar chargers are fairly cheap and small.

What is possible, however, is for the prison to run its own cell tower with whitelisted IMEIs - i.e. only the guards' phones.

It's a down to earth practical guide aimed at someone who hasn't been to prison before. The ToC features such chapters as Sharing A Cell, Violence, Getting Stuff Done (Complaints and Applications and so on. Smoking teabags, making toast using the radiator, cooking noodles in the kettle, making rope out of sheets to pass things between cells, flash-distilling vodka using ice cubes and a live 240v mains cable, it's all in there.

I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what prison really involves, day to day, from a prisoners point of view. Or anyone really. It's a fascinating document, very much DIY, reads a bit like a txtfile from back in the day.

I ran a black-hat collective between the ages of 13 and about 17. That led to getting lots of offers to hack for money, and through discussion with the people making those offers, eventually to getting interested in document security. I developed a way to replicate the UK driving license with all security features using commodity hardware. It fooled police officers and every official that ever looked at it. I sold the licenses to fund my desire to improve the design and manufacture. People used them for, among other things, fraud. 'conspiracy to defraud' was the crime.

We deliver your package by anonymous drone. Drop from any height with or without parachute at any hour of the day.

You mail us your package together and a form specifying when, where and how your package should be delivered. Use the calulator on our webpages to calculate the price of the delivery. Cash or check is accepted. Any change can be delivered with your package.

Specify drop height, parachute, time and coordinates. We will deliver within 30-60-120 minute windows at different prices.

Governments are able to play the game of constantly one-upping electronic warfare systems, but you could make it too expensive for civilians to have any sort of control or visibility when flying a drone over your site.

Oh and the drones I have seen available can't handle enough weight to lift much of anything.

Couldn't they instead mortar things into the prison? Shoot a capsule with a phone on a very steep ballistic trajectory.

In my state an inmate was broken out with a helicopter. The Dept of Corrections had an interesting solution. Anyone caught looking up at the sky goes into solitary confinement. No one has tried it since.

You don't patch the cause of the problem, you break the part of the will that would even make you think about the solution. It is much cheaper and it creates a more malleable population.

Not that I approve of the approach but the voters wanting anything that can't be painted as 3 hots and a cot.

Surely faraday cages and cell-phone jamming would be easier and less restrictive for regular people. (The BBC article says they're changing legislation to allow them to block signals in prison) From the BBC article:-

> More than 7,000 phones and Sim cards were confiscated in prisons in England and Wales last year.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...)

> Using the figures below from 2009 and 2011, the UK prison population stands at around 97,000. As of October 4, 2011 the population of women in prison in the UK is 4,635.

I don't know how many phones they're not finding. Or how long prisoners have had phones before being caught.

[1] Although England and Wales sends too many people to prison and there was a problem with women not paying tv licence fines, and then going to jail for not paying the fine.

While I agree banning small cellphones is useless, I don't care for this generalization. Not everyone in jail has a blatant disregard for law. For some it was just a moment of desperation, for some it was for some silly reason like weed, some may just be young people making mistakes and had the misfortune of being one of the few actually caught, some may not have even known they were breaking a law and some don't deserve to be there at all.

It's as if being a criminal was a lifestyle some people choose to adopt from the beginning. They don't even want out of it, and some want back "in" because that's where the culture strives.

> It's as if being a criminal was a lifestyle some people choose to adopt from the beginning. They don't even want out of it, and some want back "in" because that's where the culture strives.

You think people choose on purpose to be imprisoned rather than be free? This is a rationalization that prisoners deserve to be in prison because they are fundamentally flawed.

I actually don't think that even half of them actually want to be in jail. I think they've been made to believe there's no way out.

I should have been more careful.

All that's just my guess, I'm not really advocating the ban, I'm just trying to think from other points of view.

Prisoner with a phone-shaped object: suspicious. Prisoner with car keys: not suspicious?

I think the idea was to make it easier to notice them, as parent suggested.

We should also travel back in time and ban the fist mobile phones. Who needs it when you have the remarkable British telephone wiring system?

http://www.google.se/imgres?q=telephone+wiring+pole+mess&biw...

But wait... how about British plumbing? Can't the prisoners climb down the wall on the pipes that are conveniently located outside of the wall? Ban it!

It's much worse now.

Any basic problem involves digging up your entire garden and the street to find the pipe / cable which is pissing out water / gas / shit and piss.

Oh and OpenReach can now charge you £150 to fix your line because it's a pain in the arse to dig everything up (for the 8th time in the year) because the ground is flooded and the SNR ratio goes off the scale.

Keeps the contractors in business I suppose by my lawn looks like a fucking chess board...

SOCA obviously needs to get away from the cop on the beat mentality and think outside the box.

And stoping the rip of charges for inmates using the legitimate phone inside the prisons would stop the use of phone cards as an internal currency.

Great article about the problem in US prisons and how the FTC and mobile carriers don't want the bans against blocking removed. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/us/03prisoners.html?pagewa...

On the part of service providers also monitoring it it's difficult, a fair few prisons are actually within reasonably populated areas so it'd have to be pretty accurate signal tracking so you didn't get some spillover.

It could just be a media fantasy

It might be a proposal which has made it high enough up the food chain that it is being aired in the media to see what the reaction would be.

It could be "chaff" intended to show that the Government is doing things and to draw attention away from the Guardian/Miranda fuss of recent days.

It is unlikely to be under serious consideration. As I have said here in recent days, despite your collective geekish arrogance, they are cleverer than that and they are clever than you.

Seems like the government is attacking these phones under false pretences, which is what really worries me here.

I would prefer to have a discussion about whether it's a good idea to forbid cellphones in jail in the first place...

The real reason for a ban must be elsewhere.

I've spent time in a hospital overlooking a jail, and I really wouldn't have appreciated my mobile signals being jammed.

Woulds you use your smuggled phone if you knew the signal was going straight through the warden's cell tower?