6 ways inmates smuggle phones

Hard covered books have been a favorite among inmates for concealing contraband. When cell phones shrank, the smuggling problem expanded. People on the outside try to hide phones by cutting out a section of pages, placing the cell phone inside and gluing the pages around the phone to hide it. This worked well for flip phones and even smart phones. Corrections officers who quickly flipped through a few pages of the book to check for contraband did not detect the phone. Now they know to look at books much more thoroughly.

Lebanon Correctional Institute Warden Ernie Moore has a table full of cell phones that have been confiscated over the last few years. One of them is a real cell phone that looks like an over-sized watch. It actually tells time and can make calls by hitting a few buttons on the watch face. Corrections officers now look for oversized watches that might be used to make calls.

Inmates have tried to have people smuggle in phones inside of thick legal papers. All regular mail is checked by corrections officers in private, but legal mail from an attorney is done differently. It must be opened in the presence of the inmate. The smuggling operations begins with faking some documents and making it look like it came from a real attorney. The cell phone is hidden inside the mailing. If there is a lot of legal mail, the line of inmates awaiting their paperwork can back up and the pressure grows to pick up the pace. Several phones were found when someone mailed a legal document that was two or three inches thick and had a phone tucked inside near the binding at the top of the page. Now investigators know to look very closely when legal mail comes into the prison.

For decades people have successfully made contraband available to prison inmates by simply tossing it over the perimeter fence of the exercise yard. Sometimes cell phones are wrapped in plastic to keep them dry and cushion them from the fall to the ground. Some people have tried to place phones in tennis balls, footballs and other kinds of objects to disguise their appearance. A former corrections officer in Mansfield, Ohio was caught and convicted of putting contraband in footballs and throwing them over the fence. She is currently doing a year in prison.

Visitors have tried to bring cell phones into prison in a variety of ways, some more sophisticated than others. One method involves removing the insole of a gym shoe, carving out a space for the cell phone in the heel, replacing the insole with glue and then wearing the shoe to the prison on visiting day. The shoe must be the exact size and make of the shoe worn by the inmate. During the prison visit, the visitor and the inmate exchange shoes under the table while they are talking. Since this method was discovered inmates are now searched much more thoroughly after visiting time, including much closer examination of their shoes.