Child Monitoring and Security Information Archive 2019 - 0.29.04
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Do Jails Monitor Phone Calls
In New York, a man accused of burning his girlfriend’s face with an iron got on the phone and told her: “You don’t want to cooperate.” He told one of his sons, a potential witness, “When Daddy come out, I'm going to buy you a PS3” – a PS3 being a PlayStation 3, the gaming console. To this, the son replied: “I love you more than the whole solar system.”
Protecting the attorney-client privilege can get tricky with computerized jail and prison phone systems. An attorney often must register her phone number with the jail, so the automated system knows not to record any calls to the attorney's number.
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Mistakes, however, are sometimes made. For example, in Galveston County, Texas, all jailhouse phone calls were being recorded, even those between inmates and their attorneys, until a judge's complaint. The jail is now programming attorney phone numbers into the computerized phone system to stop the practice, the Associated Press reports.
About three weeks ago, Mr. Thomas said, someone mailed a letter containing methamphetamine to an inmate. By using the tool, Mr. Thomas said, investigators were able to link phone calls between the address and the inmate and make an arrest.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has pointed out that court cases stipulate prisoners can't expect the same privacy in jail as they'd be entitled to otherwise [source: BOP]. And, by the courts' logic, the security concerns constitute a reasonable search. In addition, because prisons make sure to give inmates ample warning that their conversations are recorded, prisoners haven't had much luck trying to challenge this practice [source: BOP].
Even though prisons are free to listen to telephone conversations, inmates still have managed to find clever ways around this surveillance. The Texas Offender's Handbook, for instance, clarifies that inmates must not talk in code or unintelligibly, which implies prisoners have attempted to do so in the past [source: TDCJ]. The Office of the Inspector General, which oversees the BOP, has issued concerns that there isn't enough man power or training for telephone monitoring staffs to successfully tackle the amount of crimes that are committed over prison phones [source: Fine]. To help monitor calls, prisons can employ voice authentication technology, which verifies the identity of the person called [source: Tehrani]. Voice authentication involves recording someone's voice and saving it. From then on, when the prisoner wants to call that person, the technology can compare the sound of that person's voice (including, for instance, its particular frequencies) to the saved file [source: Gilhooly].
Can Jailhouse Phone Calls Be Recorded?
In one, a woman sentenced to drug rehab left the center but was eventually located by an official using the service. Other examples include an official who found a missing Alzheimer’s patient and detectives who used “precise location information positioning” to get “within 42 feet of the suspect’s location” in a murder case.
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Every call is recorded. Let that sink in…every…call…is…recorded…and…stored. The inmates know that, the people being called know that. Our system was designed to monitor the calls for key words and phrases and three-way calls placed by the people they call. We’d occasionally trawl through those calls and sometimes, red-flagged calls pull up nothing of value, sometimes, there was something there. If you figure about four to six phones per dorm, five dorms per unit, then the honor dorms and there were four of those and two more dorms that were close to the control center with about four more in each of those, let me do a quick number crunch here…if memory serves…carry the one…about 68 phones (give or take) compound wide. Each call was only supposed to be 15 minutes but the inmates could call back. If each inmate makes a call throughout the day, even at 15 minutes a piece, there is no way in hell we would be able to monitor and mine every call. It’s just impossible but it didn’t prevent us from catching some slipping and we caught a lot of them talking about a lot of shit from escape plans to one literally talking about how his dick grew three more inches after he found God. NOpe, not kidding.