The Associated Press
Houston (AP) -- A different kind of prison cell has been beneficial to inmates who use them to stay in contact with the outside world, but authorities aren’t pleased.
Even though providing prisoners with cellular telephones is illegal, they’re among the most prized contraband in the Texas prison system. Inmates are sometimes using them to run criminal enterprises from inside Texas Department of Criminal Justice lockups.
“It’s a big problem,” Lt. Terry Cobbs of the prison system’s inspector general’s office told the Houston Chronicle in Monday’s editions. “And they’re not getting the phones so that they can call their mothers on Mother’s Day. They’re getting them to keep their communications open on the outside with their organized criminal activities and to make sure they’re getting all the drugs that they need.”
Fifty cell phone prosecutions are in progress, most with multiple defendants, said TDCJ Inspector General John Moriarty. He said that 47 of those originated at the Darrington Unit in Brazoria County.
Arthur Velasquez, the warden at Darrington since September 2002, has been a warden at various Texas prisons for almost 20 of his 27 years with the corrections system. He said it wasn’t until early last year that he noticed the proliferation of cell phones.
State lawmakers in 2003 made it a third-degree felony to provide an inmate with a cell phone, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
But inmates keep finding ways to get the phones into prison, said Cobbs. He said a recent investigation at the Darrington Unit was an example of how widespread the problem has become.
The FBI’s Violent Crime Task Force in Austin was monitoring cell phone calls from a Darrington inmate to his associates on the outside. The agency informed Cobbs of the investigation last fall.
“We knew who had the phone,” he said. “We knew who he was talking to and we were recording those calls. So we decided to let them keep talking unless we learned of something that we needed to stop.”
But when investigators decided to raid the inmate’s cell, they forgot to turn off the prison’s water system first and the inmate flushed the phone down his toilet.
“And, of course, the commodes in those prisons will flush down a small tree,” Cobbs said. “I mean, you better stand back and not get your shirt caught because it took that cell phone right down.”
Prison officials then searched the prison’s sewer traps for the submerged phone.
“They were pulling up cell phones like they were going fishing,” Cobbs said. “And you’d think they’d be those inexpensive disposable phones like you buy at Wal-Mart. But we’ve even been seeing camera phones.”
In April, investigators say, a TDCJ prison guard met at a Houston shopping center with an associate of a prison gang member serving time in the Darrington Unit where the guard worked. Undercover officers found the guard in possession of a quarter-ounce of heroin and a cellular telephone, as well as the $250 in cash she had been paid to smuggle the phone and drugs into the gang member’s prison cell, investigators said.