Tag: State prisons

Department of Corrections Director Joel Anderson looks at a collection of confiscated drones and cellphones outside Broad River Correctional Institution on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — A federal move toward allowing state prisons to jam cellphone signals represents a potential turning point after years of pushing from South Carolina officials, the current and former director of the state Department of Corrections said Friday.

The three-person Federal Communications Commission will vote at the end of the month on whether to change a longstanding rule barring states from blocking cellphone signals in prisons.

Acting U.S Attorney Bryan Stirling pushed for the change for 12 years as head of the prisons agency — including making trips to Washington to testify — without getting anywhere due to pushback from the telecommunications industry. He’s pleased to finally see real movement, he said.

“I was frankly stunned, and happily so,” Stirling told reporters Friday.

Stirling and other law enforcement officials have long pointed to the dangers of allowing inmates access to contraband cellphones. Using the devices, prisoners have run drug rings, operated scams and ordered hits on people’s lives, officials have said.

Last month, the state grand juries joined the calls for action after signing off on numerous indictments of people already serving time for another crime.

“It’s a matter of public safety,” Stirling said. “It’s safety for the prisons, it’s safety for the public, it’s safety for the state of South Carolina.”

The change is far from final. If the commission votes Sept. 30 to move forward, people will have an opportunity to offer public comment on the possible change. The commission must then vote again before officially changing the rule.

If the change is approved, South Carolina will be ready, said Stirling and Joel Anderson, who took the agency’s helm in April.

Over the past two years, legislators have spent $18.5 million to install and maintain technology in state prisons that can identify cellphone signals, which agency officials can then report to the phone numbers’ carriers to get the phones shut off. But that’s a tedious process.

The same company providing that technology can add on a feature blocking all cellphone signals, Stirling and Anderson said. Stirling made sure that was written into the contract when the state bought the technology to prevent starting a $34 million project from scratch if the rule changed, he said.

“One of the things I wanted to make sure is we didn’t have to go back and rip all the equipment out and redo it,” Stirling said.

South Carolina was the first state in the country licensed to use the method of tracking and shutting down each individual cellphone, which officials have compared to a game of “Whac-A-Mole.” Last year, the technology resulted in 2,600 phones being shut off within the six prisons that used it, Anderson and Stirling said.

But reporting each phone is time-consuming, and it didn’t stop more phones from coming into the prisons, Anderson said.

Jamming can also block Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals necessary to fly drones over prisons’ 60-foot netting, which inmates use to deliver drugs and other contraband, Anderson said.

“What we have today, it’s really helped us a lot, but it can be better,” Anderson said. “That’s what we want. We want it better.”

The use of cellphones inside prisons has endangered prison officers as well as the general public, Stirling and Anderson said.

In 2010, inmates ordered a hit on anti-contraband officer Capt. Robert Johnson, who survived being shot six times at his Sumter home. In 2018, Army veteran Jared Johns died by suicide after becoming the target of an inmate-run extortion scheme. And in 2022, a man was charged with setting fire to the home of Lt. Francisco Collazo in what authorities believe was an inmate-ordered hit following a contraband bust.

Prisoners used cellphones to run a massive international drug enterprise that resulted in convictions for 40 people, both inside and outside of the state’s prison system. Unmonitored phones also make it possible for inmates to coordinate the smuggling of drugs into the prisons, which can hinder the rehabilitation process for prisoners struggling with addiction, Stirling said.

Cellphones put prisoners themselves in danger. If an inmate faces threats at one prison, officials used to be able to transfer them and keep them safe. Now, other inmates can communicate their feuds across the state, making sure threats follow a prisoner wherever they end up, Stirling said.

“This is something that I think is just vitally important for the public safety in South Carolina,” Stirling said.

The prohibition on jamming cellphone signals relies on a part of the federal Communications Act of 1934 barring anyone from interfering with any “authorized” radio signals. Prisoners’ illicit cellphones shouldn’t qualify because they’re not authorized to be in prisons, argues a commission report on the possible rule change released this week.

Federal prisons are allowed to jam cellphone signals, since the law bars only states from interfering with radio signals. That rule never made sense to Stirling, especially in places like Bennettsville, where federal and state prisons sit less than three miles apart, he said.

“If the federal government can do it, why can’t the states?” Stirling said.

Inmates would still be able to call their families using prison-supplied-and-monitored telephones and tablets, which will be able to get through the jamming, Stirling and Anderson said. The signal blockers also won’t affect officers’ radios used to communicate throughout prisons, the directors said.

“I’m telling you, jamming is the answer for these cellphones,” Anderson said.