Scanners and Jammers !

The New South Wales government is finally getting serious about security in the state prison system. Last year the prison authorities confiscated 320 mobile phone smuggled in to prisoners and it is a well known fact that some incarcerated criminals continue to run their crime empires from behind bars on the basis of orders given by this medium.

In many instances mobile phone are broken down into their individual parts to avoid detection and simply assembled when needed to be used, and carried and stored by prisoners in their body cavities. The sophistication of concealment is ever increasing but detection technology is also keeping pace and the government has ordered twenty high end scanners which sound the alert even when phone parts are inactivated and the device is turned off.

All the main prisons will have a scanner on permanent duty and there will be others randomly circulated in low security prison farms and similar institutions.  The security boffins are confident that these unobtrusive units will permanently put an end to any form of mobile phone use wherever they are installed - and if so this will certainly curb the crime scene.

Interestingly, another method of barring mobile phones is completing a two year trial at Lithgow prison.  The state government worked long and hard to get permission from the Australian Communications and Media Authority to install a phone jamming device to stop all inward and outward phone traffic at this jail.    The prison became a no go zone for mobile phones and this equally applied to both prisoners and prison staff.   Now there is an application in process to extend that permit so a similar jammer can be employed at Goulburn - where the most notorious state prisoners are held in the Supermax.

Jammers are the ultimate weapon because no matter how skillfully a mobile phone is concealed, it is unusable within the range of the jammer - and that is the problem that concerns the licensing authority.  Weather conditions can cause this range to vary and if a prison is located in a builtup area the jamming could extend to nearby homes and cut contact by those passing by in cars on a nearby highway.     That is an issue that must be carefully considered when granting permission for their use.

All of this has no bearing on the fixed line telephone services to prisons and it seems certain that when these bans go into operation there will be attempts to tap into the internal phone system, but it is easy to place a monitor on the fixed number of lines available.  By law, that probably means that anyone legally using a phone in a prison would need to hear a warning that the conversation will be monitored - and that will include permitted fixed line conversations between prisoners and their families.

All this is long overdue.  The privacy issue has been exploited by opponents and some in the legal profession object to jammers on the basis that it also affects their phones when consulting with clients, but the lethal nature of terrorism and the known terrorists that we have contained in our prisons have swung the balance towards interception.