September 30, 2025
A former South Carolina jail guard focused for stopping contraband smuggling hopes federal legislation will quickly permit cellphone jamming in prisons.
A former corrections officer, who has spent the previous 15 years urging the Federal Communications Fee (FCC) to allow cellphone jamming in state prisons, is now hopeful as approval seems more and more doubtless.
After Robert Johnson, a former guard at South Carolina’s notoriously violent Lee Correctional Establishment, was focused in successful orchestrated by inmates utilizing smuggled cellphones, he devoted his life to altering the legislation to permit cellphone jamming expertise in prisons. After enduring greater than 30 surgical procedures from the accidents he sustained within the capturing, Johnson is now, for the primary time, cautiously optimistic that the FCC will approve cellphone jammers, doubtlessly stopping others from dealing with an analogous destiny.
“If that is what it took to get this legislation modified, then it was value it,” Johnson instructed NBC Information.
On Sept. 30, the FCC authorised a plan to advance the usage of cellphone jamming in state prisons. The choice opens the coverage for public remark, with a remaining vote scheduled for a later date.
It’s nice information for Johnson. As a corrections officer, Johnson’s job was to cease inmates from smuggling cellphones, medication, and different contraband. That’s when he found that an inmate had orchestrated a focused assault, leaving him shot six occasions within the chest and abdomen. Although he hoped to return to work after restoration, his accidents had been too extreme to proceed.
“My coronary heart was tousled — my liver, my lungs, diaphragm, proper leg, left leg,” Johnson, 72, recalled. “I had every part improper, from the nerve harm and trauma of these bullets.”
Johnson sees a cellphone within the arms of gang members and inmates as a “weapon of mass destruction.” For many years, he has spoken at legislation enforcement occasions nationwide and testified thrice earlier than the Federal Communications Fee, advocating to alter a 1934 federal legislation that presently bars anybody besides the U.S. authorities from interfering with public airwaves.
The previous correctional officer believes cellphone jamming expertise may cease inmates from orchestrating crimes from behind bars. At a press convention earlier this month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr defined that the legislation “prohibits the jamming of approved communication.” Having heard Johnson’s story firsthand when he labored for the fee as an lawyer in 2017, Carr stated he’s now pushing to make sure that contraband cellphone alerts are now not thought of “approved.”
“As soon as contraband cellphone use shouldn’t be a licensed communication, then the federal legislation is now not a prohibition to jamming it,” Carr stated. “And it’s nicely throughout the FCC’s authority to offer that studying to federal legislation.”
Nonetheless, wi-fi business teams proceed to push again, warning that jamming expertise may disrupt alerts past jail partitions and intervene with emergency communications between guards and paramedics. Instead, business teams level to managed entry programs, which let officers detect and remotely disable smuggled telephones.
However former South Carolina state prisons director Bryan Stirling, a staunch supporter of cellphone jamming, says that when these programs had been put in in six state prisons in 2018 after a riot at Lee Correctional Establishment, inmates nonetheless discovered methods to make use of contraband telephones. He argues that jammers are far more practical, immediately chopping off all cell communication.
“Principally, MAS is sort of a doorman at a bar, and jammers are like a door that’s all the time locked,” Stirling stated.
RELATED CONTENT: NYC Mayor Receives Jailhouse Baptism From Al Sharpton On Good Friday
