Inmate telephone abuse ?

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Q. Determining the Scope of Inmate Telephone Abuse At the outset of our review, we asked the BOP to provide us with any information it had developed on the scope of inmate use of prison telephones to engage in criminal or prohibited activities. Understandably, determining the extent of inmate telephone abuse is a difficult task. Although all calls made by inmates are recorded - with the exception of pre-arranged inmate-attorney calls - less than three and a half percent of all inmate calls are ever listened to by BOP staff. The roughly 200,000 calls made by inmates each day, coupled with the limited number of staff available for monitoring, make it difficult for the BOP to estimate the extent of inmate abuse through its existing monitoring practices.

A. The BOP has made no comprehensive attempt to collect information from its institutions on this subject or even to keep statistics on criminal referrals involving use of prison telephones. Rather, the BOP has conducted only limited samplings to determine patterns of inmate telephone usage and staff monitoring. Moreover, this research has focused on inmate use of the telephone and the amount of monitoring, but has not addressed the issues of whether the telephones were being used for criminal activities or the effectiveness of BOP's telephone monitoring. In response to our request for all records relating to the telephone system, the BOP provided documents that described its sampling efforts. The first was a BOP report summarizing results from a survey of 50 ITS institutions in November 1996 to determine the capability of ITS's search program to identify inmates who make an unusually high number of telephone calls. The survey results indicated that inmates made an average of 1.77 calls each day. The survey also found that some inmates with a high risk of continuing criminal activities while incarcerated were assigned to work details with only moderate levels of supervision. The report recommended placing such inmates in SENTRY,15 the BOP-wide database used for tracking inmates, under the new "phone abuse" security threat group (STG)16 category to better monitor their future job assignments, housing assignments, and disciplinary history. As a result of this 1996 survey, the BOP referred four cases of inmate telephone abuse to the FBI for investigation, and the BOP identified several more cases "with potential for referral." The report of the survey said that "a number of institutions responding to the survey indicated that it was a 'real eye opener,' and reported renewed emphasis on interdicting inmate telephone abuse." The report also stated that although 15 out of the 50 institutions surveyed reported no telephone abuse by the inmates, "this would appear unlikely" and those institutions should be contacted to confirm that the searches were operating properly. The BOP's Intelligence Section also requires that each institution file a Monthly Activity Report through the Regional Offices. One category in this report concerns inmates' use of prison telephones. Among other statistics, the report includes data on and descriptions of incident reports written about phone and mail abuse, the number of subpoenas for telephone data received by the institutions, inmates placed on mail monitoring, and any phone or mail intelligence that may affect other institutions. The Intelligence Section compiles the data and distributes a summary of the results to each institution. Although the monthly reports have some value by noting trends in telephone usage, they include no analysis or conclusions. One thing these summary reports do make clear, however, is that SIS offices are writing very few incident reports for inmate telephone abuse.

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