Cellphones in Your Butt: The Extreme Lengths Prisoners Take to Get Phones Inside California Prison

Samsung

Is that a phone in your arse or are you just happy to see me?

This week Gizmodo has an awesome story about how the phones actually get into our Golden State facilities.

Yes, we're talking about anal cavities.

Even with ...

... the newer, large-screen Android smartphones such as the Samsung Captivate, which the site reminds us has a 4-inch screen, is nearly 5 inches long, and has a width of 2 inches.

Whew.

Gizmodo reports that one out of every 10 prisoners in San Quentin now has a cellphone. Wow, that's enough to run a gang and partake of organized crime from the discomfort of the big house. (Oh wait, that's what does happen).

The report gets to to the good stuff about how these phones actually get inside despite the best efforts of guards (and lawmakers who have tried to stop the phone smuggling). There are visitors and work detail with Caltrans, of course, but then there's this route:

... There's a bathroom just outside one of the main San Quentin gates which is open to the public and is a big draw for tourists. Inmate work crews clean these bathrooms every day. An inmate's associate on the outside will have taped a package (of phones, drugs, tobacco, etc.) to the back of the women's toilet, for example. When the inmates come to clean, they toss it in with the rest of the trash, then sort through it later. Then, when when nobody's looking, whoop, up the butt it goes. They are usually prepackaged in latex gloves or condoms for easier insertion. Ow.

There's also the old trick of having homies throw a rumpled up bag of discarded fast food over the fence, where inmate work crews will pick it up in the morning and hide the goods in a lawnmower bag for later retrieval.

Then, of course, there's the old fashioned way: Bribing guards.

We just hope, for their own health's sake, that inmates don't start getting into iPads.

[@dennisjromero/djromero@laweekly.com]