Panic! Contraband in Jails
March 1, 2022
A small tidbit from my interview with Sheriff Mark Lamb in Pinal County, Arizona, where – in addition to running border field trips for politicians – the sheriff also runs Arizona’s 3rd largest jail which houses around 1,500 people, involved jail security. All visits, he told me, are now video only and have been since around 2013.
In our interview, Lamb said “We don’t do any person-to-person visits…we've always done it that way. It sounds worse, but look at how far out we are. … people can visit their family [and they] can do it right from the house. They don't have to come down here. You just can't risk people bringing stuff in to the prison.”
The video calls cost $6 for 20 minutes/ $12 for 40 minutes and are run by Securus.
As background, the Pinal County Jail also has an active 287(g) agreement with ICE; Pinal County also has the highest number of incarcerated people as residents with around 15 correctional facilities including state prisons and private detention facilities. A look at Vera’s data shows how the population in the Pinal County jail has changed over time – there was a massive expansion in 2006 that more than triple available bed space. After that time, there was an ISGA agreement to hold people for the federal government, including ICE, but this contract ended around 2015. Right now, the population of the jail mainly consists of people held pretrial or for shorter state sentences as well as some people being held for other counties.
At the National Sheriffs Association conferences, there is a proliferation of businesses that specialize in limiting face-to-face contact between people held in jail and the outside world. For example, you can pay Pigeonly to scan letters and make them PDFs for people to read via a tablet – you can also send money or pictures, all for a fee of course. The high cost of phone calls and video calls has been well-documented. (Jails calls generally cost more than prison calls often because of lower volume/ higher contract price and general inertia by lawmakers because individual sheriffs and jailers make these contracts and set rates.)
The premise behind Lamb’s theory is that most contraband is brought into jail by visitors. This premise is simply false. While all sorts of people can and do smuggle contraband, the pandemic and subsequent strict limits on in-person visitation have made it clear that contraband – usually drugs and cellphones – are smuggled into jails (and prisons) largely with the help of jailers and other non-sworn personnel. According to a 2018 Prison Policy Initiative study, more news stories featured staffers and sworn personnel bringing in contraband than visitors. (As a quick note: It can be hard to determine and criminally charge who is smuggling contraband because the items are usually found in common areas, so it’s not clear who is responsible.)
Last week, for example, a correctional officer at the D.C. jail was arrested for accepting payment for smuggling in knives, drugs, and cellphones to people incarcerated there. In Texas, efforts to prevent contraband smuggling by visitors only resulted in more of it; the head of the prison guard union cited low pay. Two guards in Bexar County were arrested for smuggling meth in 2018. When outside visitors were banned at Rikers, the presence of contraband increased.
(My personal theory is that reducing visitation creates additional stress and misery – in addition to the lack of clear and accurate information from jail authorities – which increases the demand for contraband like drugs and cell phones, creating opportunities for guards and staff to make extra money, which they probably needed during the pandemic. As one advocate cited in The City says, the guards get a monopoly.)
Yet, sheriffs and jailers, like Lamb, continue to claim that contraband is smuggled in by visitors. Other versions assert that contraband is an effect of insufficient staffing because officers are unable to check everyone properly. The myth that visitors carry contraband is so prevalent that the impact affects legislation, policies, media narratives, spending, and staffing. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pigeonly, the company that reduces mail to PDF images, sends a weekly email listing such stories.)
There is also something inherently sexiest about the myth of contraband; one so virulent that it often transcends the “bad prisoner” story. The story goes something like this: women – whether guards or visitors – are especially subject to corruption -- for love, money, or just their secretive nature – and, as a result, are more willing to engage in the art of concealment. In 2012, Jeff Toobin of the New Yorker wrote about corruption and contraband inside of Baltimore’s city jail, which is run by the state (and involved federal indictments of several people for a long-running scheme involving contraband and bribery). He takes pains to point out that over half of the correctional staff are women and posits that the male inmates were taking advantage of their fairer sex guards:
Female guards smuggled the contraband into the facility, concealing it “in their underwear, hair, internally and elsewhere,” according to a government filing. The guards were subject to cursory or nonexistent searches when they entered the premises, and they also brought in the cell phones for the inmates to use, even though correctional officers were forbidden to carry phones while working.
One of Toobin’s hot takes is arguing that Black men, specifically Black men affiliated with gangs like the Black Guerilla Family, are sexist and see women guards as opportunities to obtain contraband like cell phones and drugs.
Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have been consensual, and initiated by the inmates. “When they started having these really young girls as guards, that’s when it really went downhill,” the former inmate Kevin said. “They get infatuated with the gang members.
I am giving Toobin a tough time because he is so sexist and racist, just writing about people with dripping scorn and disgust. But to be fair to him, the narrative that women guards are more easily manipulated because they are women persists everywhere, in the law and in culture. (A recent example in Barton County, Kansas, featured the arrest of a jail staffer who was allegedly having a relationship with someone incarcerated.) It cannot be because they get paid less or have more people to take care of at home. Nor could it be structural inequalities that produced entire communities where most people spent time in jails. Nor could it be because of caretaking expectations or genuine love and concern.
**
Of course, items are only contraband if authorities say they are, and the idea of contraband relies on a notion of jails as somehow impermeable, like a bubble where nothing goes in or out. If COVID taught free people anything, it should be that this is not true. Jails and prisons are incredibly porous, with people, items, and information constantly moving in and out, shaping ideas inside and outside the jail walls.
Historically, this was obvious. Jails were usually in the sheriff’s basement and the sheriff’s wife cooked the food and did the washing for the entire household. Even children helped out. Women and children held by the sheriff for whatever reason often just stayed in the house as guests. People passed notes from inside the jail to the outside by hiding slips of paper in clothing to be laundered. For a long time, cigarettes and alcohol were given freely as payment for work in lieu of cash.
The bigger problems with an obsession with stopping contraband are increasingly harsh and insulting rules for in-person visitations and the use of technology as a way to minimize contact between people held in the jail and the outside world.
Visitors have long been subject to punitive and aggressive searches, including full strip searches, to ensure they are not carrying contraband inside. Because many visitors are female (because most people incarcerated are men), this puts many women at the mercy of guards even though those women have not been accused of a crime. Visitors have almost no control over the procedures in place at a jail and almost no recourse since jailers can restrict visits at any time for almost any reason (and jailers can punish the incarcerated person in any way they please). So, it seems logical that most visitors comply and little changes.
The second problem is more recent. The burst of law enforcement technology that is relatively easy to use – scanners, televisits, and the like – means that jailers can expediently replace in-person visits with electronic ones. COVID provided a convenient excuse for the implementation of technological solutions, and few could find it problematic considering the extent to which people on the outside also used technology to replace in-person visits for everything from school, to doctors, to weddings, to business meetings. (Note: they are problematic for many reasons, mainly due to the high costs that are borne by the callers.)
The same is true for journalists and oversight. In the first place, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to jails; jailers can stop outsiders from entering any time they want to and for any reason. There is no special right for journalists to access information, despite journalists saying so, which is probably right given the prevalence of citizen-journalists and the like. (What is a journalist? I don’t know.) Given that, jails historically have no reason to let outsiders inside; probably, they have even less of a reason because anyone can post about their experience on social media. But this also restricts the access of information inside of the jail.
[My personal experience with this over the years is incredibly random. In some places, I have literally just walked in with no questions whatsoever. I was banned from all California prisons because the CDCR didn’t like something I wrote. And in some places, they just don’t let you in despite scheduled appointments because they didn’t like the cut of my jib, I suppose.]
And things just got worse. The conditions that restricted visitors also prevented people from seeing what was happening inside (and prevented people inside from communicating to the outside world). The administrator for the Oklahoma County Jail, for example, praised COVID because it kept out journalists. “COVID is our friend,” Greg Williams said. COVID was “the greatest thing that has ever happened” because it was a “built-in excuse” to keep out the news media.
But now many of those technologies are here to stay and there is little to no incentive for jailers to change the rules. Instead, sheriffs, jailers, prison authorities, and private correctional industry executives have absorbed the reformist idea that more visits are better to argue that video visits help people because they increase visits. As one North Carolina sheriff said in 2018 (he is no longer in office), “[T]his program has increased access to loved ones while also increasing the safety and security of our facilities, inmates and staff alike at no cost to taxpayers.”
COVID both put more pressure on the myth of a sealed space for people accused of a crime and exposed the lie behind it. As many jails released more people to prevent overcrowding and reduce populations (the only real way to limit the spread of COVID), sheriffs and jail administrators also cracked down on people going in and out. The advance in technology and lack of oversight allowed this to happen quickly and easily, without a lot of questions from the left, who were been more concerned (rightly, in most cases, given the number of incarcerated who were sick and died) with COVID prevention. Despite the assumption that technology was better, I haven’t seen a study to suggest whether this was true — did reducing visits actually reduce COVID spread? Or, as is usual, were the real culprits more complex and dynamic, a mix of incarcerated people being moved about the guards and staff who were not tested before coming to work?
Regardless of the cause, I would argue, now is the time to re-examine those policies so readily embraced for their technocratic convenience and think more broadly about health for people on the inside of jails and similar institutions. It could be that the wholehearted embrace of the reform movement of technology and information tracking will simply make it easier to shunt away visitors for next time. The real good thing about COVID might be that people were willing not to ask too many questions.
"didn't like your jib"? Is that what you call your boobs that you cannot stop showing off in every setting to gain access? Of course the prisons throw you out! You won't even read the rules of attire (for those who weren't raised properly -ahem!). I know Mark Lamb and what you write are bald faced lies. But your ignorance and arrogance passing as educated to the uninformed? Breathtaking. I'm spreading the word about you. Hit pieces are all you write. Why don't you comment on the film series "Your Room is Quiet Forever" of real Pinal County mother's losing their children to Mexican fentanyl right here every day. You are a Harpie on the backs of the dead children of our County and our fine Sheriff. Shame on you.