This is long overdue!

 

Thanks to insane regulations that forbid prisons to jam cellphone signals, inmates have for decades (literally) been using smuggled cellphones to operate crime networks and organize specific crimes from behind bars.  We've known they're doing it, but the regulators have always insisted that cellphone frequencies may not be jammed for any reason.

At long last, that looks to be changing.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5, 2025 – The Federal Communications Commission may soon give state and local prisons authority Congress has repeatedly declined to grant.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday the commission will vote Sept. 30 on a proposal to let state and local prisons jam contraband cell phones - effectively cutting off the smuggled devices inmates use to communicate with the outside world. Carr stressed it would be voluntary and not a federal mandate to jam.

“Contraband cell phones are the root of so many evils taking place, not just in prisons, but across the country, for the crimes that people are phoning in and enabling,” Carr said, speaking at the Arkansas Attorney General’s office in Little Rock, following a tour of Varner Prison. “We need to do something about this serious threat to public safety.”

Carr said the proposal would sidestep federal law by declaring that calls from contraband cell phones are not “authorized communications” under 47 U.S.C. § 333, the statute that bars jamming. By de-authorizing those communications inside prisons, the FCC would clear the way for state and local facilities to deploy targeted jamming technology without running afoul of federal restrictions.

“Once contraband cell phone use is not an ‘authorized communication,' then the federal law is no longer a prohibition to jamming it, and that's well within the FCC authority to give that reading to federal law,” Carr said.

There's more at the link.

When I worked as a prison chaplain, I became aware of more than a few major crimes (up to and including murder) that were clandestinely arranged between inmates and their families and gangs outside the walls.  Even though that was a couple of decades ago, and modern miniaturized cellphones (much more easily concealed than the bigger, old-fashioned bricks) did not exist at the time, the cellular network was an increasingly important element in those arrangements.  With modern phones and encrypted communications apps, it's become a nightmare to keep track of what's going on.  This decision should be a major benefit to law enforcement in shutting down some of the worst of the worst criminals, who've regarded incarceration as simply a better-protected way for them to do business (because inside prison walls, their enemies outside find it, not impossible, but harder to get at them).

Peter