Senate Votes to Increase Penalties for BOP Contraband Cellphone Smuggling
On September 28, 2024, the U.S. Senate passed legislation enhancing penalties for contraband cellphone possession in federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) lockups. Named after BOP Lt. Osvaldo Albarati, who was killed in a 2013 ambush arranged with contraband cellphones by prisoners at BOP’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, the measure was introduced by Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) just three days earlier. Fellow senators reacted in near-record time to pass S.5284.
In a report published on June 7, 2024, journalist Walter Pavlo recalled a time not long ago when a federal prisoner caught with a cellphone was placed in a special housing unit (SHU)—BOP’s term for isolation—and sanctioned with loss of Good Conduct Time (GCT) sentence credits. Now, he said, there are so many cellphones that an unnamed guard pointed to a stack that had been confiscated at a prison Pavlo visited and said, “In the old days we would have looked at those confiscated phones as evidence, but some corrupt correction officers look at them as inventory to resell to inmates.”
Disconnection from family, friends and the information highway creates high demand for contraband cell phones. BOP restricts prisoners to 500 minutes of phone calls a month, none longer than 15 minutes. Prison-issued tablets have no internet access, providing only preloaded games, movies, programming and reading material. Amid this isolation, the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Atlanta confiscated 800 cellphones in 2021; since the prison holds only 1,500, literally every other prisoner had one. The unrelenting demand is met with drone drops, corrupt guards and smuggling by visitors. Black-market value reaches $3,000 for a cellphone to purchase, $100 to $200 hourly for rental.
But BOP’s options are limited by a chronic shortage of guards, leaving too few to effectively interdict so many illegal phones. SHU placement and sentences extended by lost GCT simply create the need for more guard hours that the agency can’t cover. The 41-day maximum GCT sanction for possessing an illegal cellphone adds at least $4,920 of incarceration costs per prisoner. Any overtime taken up by existing guard staff also translates into additional expense, as does deploying cellphone signal-jamming technology. All of this discourages crackdowns on prisoner cellphone use like the one the Senate legislation was designed to spur.
After that vote, U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) introduced a companion bill, H.R. 10161, to the U.S. House on November 18, 2024—not leaving her colleagues long to act before the Congressional session adjourned for good on January 3, 2025. PLN will update developments as they are available.
Additional source: Forbes
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login