FCC Finally Lets Prisons Jam Inmate Crime Networks

For years inmates have run drug rings, ordered hits, and preyed on kids from inside their cells using contraband phones that poured into jails by the tens of thousands. That ends now. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced today that the commission will vote November 19 to let state and local prisons jam those devices for the first time ever.

Nearly half a million inmates currently have access to smuggled phones. Guards seize roughly 25,000 of them every year, yet the problem keeps growing. Inmates use them to coordinate violence, keep criminal enterprises running, and distribute child sexual abuse material. The FCC’s new rules give corrections officials a tool they have been denied for years: the ability to shut the phones down inside the facility without spilling interference into the surrounding community.

Carr made the announcement in Arkansas alongside Senator Tom Cotton and Attorney General Tim Griffin. The order is optional for prisons, not a mandate, and it includes technical safeguards so only the designated area is affected. It is a straightforward public-safety measure that treats contraband phones as the ongoing criminal threat they are rather than an inevitable feature of incarceration.