Post by First time caller on May 22, 2009 23:24:24 GMT -5
Prisoners Run Gangs, Plan Escapes, and Even Order Hits With Smuggled Cellphones
In one prison monitored by signal sensors, "the maximum-security sector looked like a telemarketing center."
Photo: Andrew Hetherington In his 25-plus years as a Texas state senator, John Whitmire had never received a phone call like this one.
"I know your daughters' names," said a nasal voice. "I know how old they are. I know where they live." Then the caller recited the young women's names, ages, and addresses. The senator, sitting at an antique rolltop desk in his Houston office, gripped the handset tighter.
Whitmire is the bald-headed, blunt-talking chair of the state senate's Criminal Justice Committee, a law-and-order man who displays an engraved pistol in his office. But that call last October 7, he says, "scared the hell out of me." Richard Tabler, the man on the other end of the line, had murdered at least two people and possibly four. He was a prisoner on Texas' death row, supposedly locked safely away. But from the narrow bunk of his solitary cell an hour's drive north of Houston, Tabler had reached out and touched one of the Lone Star State's most powerful politicians with a smuggled Motorola cell phone.
Richard Tabler photographed at the Texas prison where he is on death row. Tabler insists he was just voicing concerns to a public official. "I was talking to him about treatment on death row, how inmates are abused back here, not fed, not showered," he says, sitting in a locked booth in the visiting room of Polunsky Unit, the sprawling facility that houses death row. He's facing me through a thick pane of bulletproof glass. We talk, of course, by telephone.
Tall, pale, and gangly, with wispy facial hair and big green eyes that bulge like an emu's, Tabler looks considerably younger than his 30 years. A crudely tattooed tear leaks from one eye. Rows of thin white self-inflicted scars mark the backs of his hands and forearms. A former cook with a long, violent criminal history, Tabler wound up in Polunsky after resolving a disagreement with the manager of a strip club and his friend by shooting them dead. Days later, two teenage pole dancers who worked at the club were also murdered. Tabler freely owns up to shooting the two men, which earned him his death sentence. He has at various times admitted and denied slaying the strippers. (He tells me he "gave the green light" for their murders.)
Whitmire didn't believe Tabler when he announced who he was. So the inmate kicked the door of his cell, flushed his steel toilet, and held the phone out to the clanging and yelling from the row's other residents. And, just to make sure he had the senator's attention, Tabler rattled off those personal details about his daughters. Tabler claims he didn't mean to threaten Whitmire. "I was letting him know that just because I'm on death row, it doesn't mean I'm stupid," he says. "It doesn't mean I can't get information."
Inmates aren't allowed to have cell phones in any US prison, let alone on death row. But the 21st century's ubiquitous communications tools are nonetheless turning up by the thousands in lockups not just in Texas but across the US and around the world. Last year alone, officials confiscated 947 phones in Maryland, some 2,000 handsets and accessories in South Carolina, and 2,800 mobiles in California.
The presence of cell phones is changing the very meaning of imprisonment. Incarceration is supposed to isolate criminals, keeping them away from one another and the rest of us so they can't cause any more harm. But with a wireless handset, an inmate can slip through walls and locked doors at will and maintain a digital presence in the outside world. Prisoners are using voice calls, text messages, email, and handheld Web browsers to taunt their victims, intimidate witnesses, run gangs, and organize escapes—including at least one incident in Tennessee in which a guard was killed. An Indiana inmate doing 40 years for arson made harassing calls to a 23-year-old woman he'd never met and phoned in bomb threats to the state fair for extra laughs.
Video: California Department of Corrections"Cell phones," says James Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association, "are now one of our top security threats."
Talking to his own security threat, Whitmire stayed calm, hearing out the prisoner's complaints. He noted Tabler's number, then promptly called John Moriarty, the Texas prison system's beefy, mustached inspector general, asking how the hell an inmate had gotten hold of a cell phone in what is supposed to be one of the state's highest-security lockups.
Moriarty's people subpoenaed the records for the phone that had dialed Whitmire. They were astonished by what they found: The device had logged more than 2,800 calls and text messages in the preceding month. At least nine other prisoners had used it, investigators say, including members of such notorious gangs as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Crips.
In response, on October 20, Texas governor Rick Perry ordered every one of the state's 112 prisons locked down and all 156,000 inmates searched. Officials found 128 phones, including a dozen on death row, as well as scores of chargers, batteries, and SIM cards. That brought the total number of phones and related items confiscated from Texas prisons in 2008 to more than 1,000.
Video : www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-06/ff_prisonphones
In one prison monitored by signal sensors, "the maximum-security sector looked like a telemarketing center."
Photo: Andrew Hetherington In his 25-plus years as a Texas state senator, John Whitmire had never received a phone call like this one.
"I know your daughters' names," said a nasal voice. "I know how old they are. I know where they live." Then the caller recited the young women's names, ages, and addresses. The senator, sitting at an antique rolltop desk in his Houston office, gripped the handset tighter.
Whitmire is the bald-headed, blunt-talking chair of the state senate's Criminal Justice Committee, a law-and-order man who displays an engraved pistol in his office. But that call last October 7, he says, "scared the hell out of me." Richard Tabler, the man on the other end of the line, had murdered at least two people and possibly four. He was a prisoner on Texas' death row, supposedly locked safely away. But from the narrow bunk of his solitary cell an hour's drive north of Houston, Tabler had reached out and touched one of the Lone Star State's most powerful politicians with a smuggled Motorola cell phone.
Richard Tabler photographed at the Texas prison where he is on death row. Tabler insists he was just voicing concerns to a public official. "I was talking to him about treatment on death row, how inmates are abused back here, not fed, not showered," he says, sitting in a locked booth in the visiting room of Polunsky Unit, the sprawling facility that houses death row. He's facing me through a thick pane of bulletproof glass. We talk, of course, by telephone.
Tall, pale, and gangly, with wispy facial hair and big green eyes that bulge like an emu's, Tabler looks considerably younger than his 30 years. A crudely tattooed tear leaks from one eye. Rows of thin white self-inflicted scars mark the backs of his hands and forearms. A former cook with a long, violent criminal history, Tabler wound up in Polunsky after resolving a disagreement with the manager of a strip club and his friend by shooting them dead. Days later, two teenage pole dancers who worked at the club were also murdered. Tabler freely owns up to shooting the two men, which earned him his death sentence. He has at various times admitted and denied slaying the strippers. (He tells me he "gave the green light" for their murders.)
Whitmire didn't believe Tabler when he announced who he was. So the inmate kicked the door of his cell, flushed his steel toilet, and held the phone out to the clanging and yelling from the row's other residents. And, just to make sure he had the senator's attention, Tabler rattled off those personal details about his daughters. Tabler claims he didn't mean to threaten Whitmire. "I was letting him know that just because I'm on death row, it doesn't mean I'm stupid," he says. "It doesn't mean I can't get information."
Inmates aren't allowed to have cell phones in any US prison, let alone on death row. But the 21st century's ubiquitous communications tools are nonetheless turning up by the thousands in lockups not just in Texas but across the US and around the world. Last year alone, officials confiscated 947 phones in Maryland, some 2,000 handsets and accessories in South Carolina, and 2,800 mobiles in California.
The presence of cell phones is changing the very meaning of imprisonment. Incarceration is supposed to isolate criminals, keeping them away from one another and the rest of us so they can't cause any more harm. But with a wireless handset, an inmate can slip through walls and locked doors at will and maintain a digital presence in the outside world. Prisoners are using voice calls, text messages, email, and handheld Web browsers to taunt their victims, intimidate witnesses, run gangs, and organize escapes—including at least one incident in Tennessee in which a guard was killed. An Indiana inmate doing 40 years for arson made harassing calls to a 23-year-old woman he'd never met and phoned in bomb threats to the state fair for extra laughs.
Video: California Department of Corrections"Cell phones," says James Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association, "are now one of our top security threats."
Talking to his own security threat, Whitmire stayed calm, hearing out the prisoner's complaints. He noted Tabler's number, then promptly called John Moriarty, the Texas prison system's beefy, mustached inspector general, asking how the hell an inmate had gotten hold of a cell phone in what is supposed to be one of the state's highest-security lockups.
Moriarty's people subpoenaed the records for the phone that had dialed Whitmire. They were astonished by what they found: The device had logged more than 2,800 calls and text messages in the preceding month. At least nine other prisoners had used it, investigators say, including members of such notorious gangs as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Crips.
In response, on October 20, Texas governor Rick Perry ordered every one of the state's 112 prisons locked down and all 156,000 inmates searched. Officials found 128 phones, including a dozen on death row, as well as scores of chargers, batteries, and SIM cards. That brought the total number of phones and related items confiscated from Texas prisons in 2008 to more than 1,000.
Video : www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-06/ff_prisonphones