The 33 prisons in California, like all prisons around the world, have problems with people sneaking in mobile phones and in order to remedy the situation they’re calling in man’s best friend. Dogs, which have been used to find drugs, weapons, people, and last night’s leftovers, are now being trained to hunt for mobile phones. The people who train them say that all phones give off a scent. Upon inspecting my Nexus One I could not detect any order. Back to the dogs, California currently has 14 of them that are specially trained to find the smuggled devices, and by the end of the summer they plan on having 23 dogs with “the gift”. Pictured below is Drako, a 2 year old Belgian Malinois.
As of May 2010 there were 4,800 mobiles confiscated in California, via either the dogs or random cell searches. Compare that to over 7,000 in 2009, and only 261 in 2006, and you start to figure that this problem is getting harder and harder to, excuse the pun, nip in the butt. Inmates who have mobile phones not only do the typical things you’d expect, such as call hits on their enemies or order drugs, but they also record the prison’s security procedures and send them to people on the outside who can figure out how to break them out. Child molesters are also using the devices to talk to children online now that most mobile phones have some sort of capable web browser.
This isn’t the first time we wrote about phone sniffing dogs. Murphy was Britain’s first. So how effective are these animals? It’s hard to say. Dogs are cheaper than xray machines, and phone jammers are a tad bit illegal, plus they cause interference problems, so dogs remain the best option at the moment. You’d think there would be some special paint that could be used on the walls to block the signals from getting out, thus forcing an inmate to use a mobile phone only during the hours when he’s allowed outside, and only an idiot would put a Motorola RAZR up to his ear while the guards were watching everyone.