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Prisons still waiting for mobile phone jamming tech
Phones smuggled into London's largest prison

By Nick Heath

Published: Wednesday 12 November 2008

New technologies have not stopped mobile phones being smuggled into one of the UK's biggest prisons.

The failure to deploy tech which can find and block the phones - often used to arrange drug deliveries and other crimes - is fuelling the narcotics problem inside Wandsworth Prison, according to a report by the prison's independent monitoring board (IMB).

The IMB has been calling for three years for jamming technology to be introduced and believes the drugs trade in Wandsworth would be halved if phones were jammed.

The IMB says that the number of phones inside London's largest prison has "shot up alarmingly" this year and attributes the rise to a lack of use of the Bodily Orifice Security Scanner (Boss) - a chair that checks for concealed phones inside the body - and the government for not supplying promised mobile phone jamming technology.

"We had very high hopes last year that the Boss chair would be used to try and detect more phones being brought in by prisoners. Unfortunately it has hardly been used at all," the IMB says in its 07 - 08 report on Wandsworth.

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"For the past three years in this report we have asked the Home Office and then the Ministry of Justice to implement an effective jamming system to curtail the use of mobile phones. We have been promised that trials are taking place but nothing is happening in the large local prisons to jam the use of mobile phones.

Earlier this year the government promised that Boss chairs and mobile phone jammers would be rolled throughout non-high security prisons from March 2009.

Prison governor Ian Mulholland claimed the jail had an effective mobile phone screening system that detected more mobile phones in the last year using a combination of scanners, dogs and police intelligence.

Mulholland said in a statement: "The increase in the number of mobile phones found in the prison last year is testament to the hard work of prison staff and their success in tackling the problem.

"As well as the Boss chair, HMP Wandsworth makes use of Boss wands which can be more effective at detecting smuggled items."