The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is moving right along in its bid to cut off prison communication from both sides, by decreasing access to contraband phones as well as regulated ones. Amid a high-profile battle over its decision to nearly double the price caps on phone and video calls, the FCC is also creating a legal loophole that will authorize prisons to signal-jam contraband cell phones. After more than two months of buildup, the proposed rule to allow signal-jamming was published in the Federal Register on November 26.
Signal-jamming is banned by federal law. Section 333 of the Communications Act of 1934 “prohibits willful or malicious interference with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under the Act or operated by the US Government.” The FCC is not proposing to change this, but to revoke authorization for certain devices located inside prisons.
For years, the FCC resisted pressure from corrections departments and telecommunications contractors to authorize signal jamming in prisons. Then in September the agency announced that it planned to vote on a proposal to update the regulations, and subsequently voted to approve. Many proponents of prison signal-jamming have theatrically expressed their support, including a coalition of 23 state attorneys general in a joint letter to the FCC. But the public isn’t able to formally comment on any proposed rule until it’s published in the Federal Register. The signal-jamming rule, “Promoting Technological Solutions To Combat Contraband Wireless Device Use in Correctional Facilities,” is now open for public comment until December 26.
“This approach would allow departments of correction (DOCs) to employ jamming solutions, or other similar technologies, without violating section 333,” the proposed rule states, “and would provide an additional tool to prevent criminal activity stemming from unauthorized communications within and to those outside a correctional facility.”
On November 27, the day after the proposed FCC rule appeared in the Federal Register, Oklahoma Voice reported that the Oklahoma Department of Corrections is “in talks with different companies” interested in providing the technology. The department will pilot the jamming devices at a maximum-security prison and expand from there, and plans to give signal-jamming priority over other projects in its technology budget.
“[H]istory shows that once you can legally import and sell something, vendors will sell it to anyone,” Harold Feld, senior vice president of nonprofit Public Knowledge, stated in September. “The FCC has no way to enforce the ‘only to correctional facilities rule.’ If the FCC adopts this rule, we can expect jammers to start showing up in movie theaters, restaurants, hotels or just randomly.”
Much of the public opposition to signal-jamming revolves around the potential to interfere with 911 calls in nearby communities, as well as the slippery slope of creating an unnecessary loophole in federal law. But signal-jamming should also be understood as unacceptably harmful to prisoners and opposed for that reason in and of itself.
The narrative that contraband phones are a danger to the public is heavily influenced by telecommunications contractors.
Contraband cell phones are the preferred scapegoat for policy decisions fueling violence in prisons. The claims typically made by corrections departments, correctional telecommunications contractors, elected officials and now the FCC are that the phones are used to “coordinate criminal enterprises, intimidate witnesses and orchestrate violence both inside and outside prison walls,” though sometimes they’ll throw in “and even plan escapes.”
It is true that contraband cell phones are used, for instance, to extort families of some incarcerated people into paying protection fees to gang-affiliated prisoners. But this phenomenon can’t be accurately explained without several pieces of surrounding context.
First, the narrative that contraband phones are a danger to the public is heavily influenced by telecommunications contractors like Securus Technologies, which profit off having a monopoly on prison and jail phone calls. In late June, the FCC announced that it would delay implementation of its historic 2024 regulations lowering the price caps on incarcerated people’s communication services, while it reconsidered whether doing so was a good idea. In the months since it has systematically dismantled the regulations, replacing them with a revised version that was more amenable to profiteering contractors, who count on prisoners having no other way to make phone calls.
Second, extortion is hardly the most common way contraband phones are used. In addition to circumventing the high prices of prison communication services, on a day-to-day basis people are using contraband cell phones to stay connected to friends and family, prepare for re-entry, support themselves through side hustles and generally use the internet for research and entertainment the same way people on the outside do.
While proponents of signal-jamming aren’t interested in most of those activities, what does concern them is the fact that over the past few years incarcerated people have increasingly used contraband phones to share photos and videos showing what life inside really looks like. Contraband phones were instrumental in prompting the Department of Justice investigations into conditions inside the Georgia Department of Corrections system, and Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee. They’re also routinely used to call for help during emergencies that go unnoticed by staff, a fact that should be of equal concern to anyone who opposes prison signal-jamming because of its potential to disrupt 911 calls.
Third, that kind of extortion happens because people in prison are being steadily deprived of basic resources like food, not because they have access to cell phones. It will continue with or without cell phones, so long as the root cause remains unaddressed.
Image (cropped) via Attorney General of Arkansas Tim Griffin/YouTube