California tries again to thwart prison cellphone smuggling

(AP) — California is installing nearly 1,000 sophisticated metal detectors, scanners and secret security cameras at its prisons in its latest attempt to thwart the smuggling of cellphones, thousands of which continue to flood the prisons despite previous efforts.

Officials say the phones can be used to coordinate everything from attacks in prison to crimes on the street, yet they have thus far been unable to prevent even high-security inmates like cult killer Charles Manson from repeatedly getting the devices that are illegal behind bars.

Corrections officials told The Associated Press a year ago that they were halting the expansion of a now 5-year-old program designed to make unauthorized cellphones useless by capturing their signals before calls are connected.

[...] Virginia-based Global Tel-Link, the nation's largest prison phone company, is heading a new approach funded by a projected $17 million a year from California inmates and their families who use landlines to make phone calls that are monitored for security reasons.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is installing 272 more metal detectors, 68 X-ray machines to scan packages, 103 low-dose X-ray scanners, 170 hidden surveillance cameras, 34 devices to decrypt and analyze cellphones, and 272 scanners that detect magnetic signals.