In most jails and jails, cell phones are considered contraband and can be confiscated if found in a prisoner’s possession. If they’re lucky, that’s the limit of the punishment. But just because something isn’t allowed doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and phones inside enclosed spaces are popular for most of the same reasons they’re popular outside. : they are fun and useful tools for work or communication.
Keri Blakinger writes of the wide range of uses inmates have found for cell phones:
Most of what I knew about illicit electronics came from press releases and news reports that offered example after example of all the bad things people could do with contraband phones, things like drug dealing, threats and scams. While it’s true that these things can happen, over the past three years I’ve also seen a lot of people use their phones for good. Some use them to self-publish books or take college courses online. Others become prison reform advocates, teach computer skills, trade bitcoins or write legal briefs. I’ve seen a whole plethora of savvy and creative uses that go against stereotypes about people behind bars. “Our cell phones have saved lives,” a man in prison in South Carolina told me.
Besides communication, activism and journalism, cell phones are popular, not least because they can be used for profit (helped, not hindered, by the peculiarities of the prison economy):
Even though contraband phones can cost between $300 and $6,000, the devices sometimes make money, as many inmates use them to earn money. One Texas prisoner I interviewed sold his artwork online, while others say they used their phone to learn how to trade stocks or perform online gigs. More generally, I know guys who use their phones to find work as freelance writers. You might read their stories without even knowing that the author wrote them from prison. Unhindered Internet access speeds research, and one man explained that an expensive contraband phone can always turn out to be cheaper and more reliable than communicating in an approved way.
“The typewriter ribbons here are exorbitantly priced,” explained one federal prisoner. “SMS conversation makes writing articles so much cheaper, even including the cost of the phone and plan”… Some people make money by renting out their phones or charging people to use them as points access to secretly connect their prison. internet tablets. “You can buy hotspot time for $1 a day,” a Southern state prisoner told me. “One dollar equals two ramen noodle soups, and that’s how it pays.”
But the most common use of a phone in jail or prison is simply to keep in touch with friends and family on the outside.
When the California prisoner I spoke to got his first phone about a decade ago, the first thing he said, he said, was call his wife and ask to talk to his son. Ordinary uses like that, he said, are why most people in prison want phones.
“I mean, there are people you might have legitimate concerns about their phone, and they might want to order a shot,” he said. “But in the prison where I am, the only thing we want to order is pizza.”
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