Last updated April 12, 2019
Law enforcement officials across the whole of the United States have to deal with a new trend in contraband when it comes to prison inmates: new and old cell phones. Metro Jail Warden Trey Oliver from Mobile County says that cell phones are now the most common item that is discovered on prisoners.
The prison has a whole collection of banned items that have been confiscated from inmates including the likes of handmade weapons, chains that have been made from tied up t-shirts and even a speaker that was made out of a box of crackers. The number one item however, is cell phones, according to Oliver.
“There for a while, we were finding them on a weekly basis,” Oliver notes. The prisoners also have a number of highly creative and innovative ways of trying to get the cellular devices into the prison. “They’ll tie it to a piece of string and lower it into a drain,” Oliver explains. Sometimes jail employees will also try to smuggle in cell phones for inmates and on one occasion, an employee was fired for doing just that, with the phone having been hidden inside of the wrapper for a hamburger.
“These inmates are very creative and they will go to great lengths to smuggle these in,” the warden points out. “And nothing is off limits, including body cavities… The last thing you want is an inmate to go trial to have contact with a victim or witness.”