[onetimeonly]

Cells in UK jails are not barren concrete-and-metal things like in the movies. They have a sink, a desk, a kettle, a TV, a (usually padded) chair and a bed. You charge your phone by plugging it in :).

Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up (you have to earn it or have it sent in - it's not free). Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems.

Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment.

I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate peoples desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.

[zwieback]

Too bad someone crafty enough to modify a cassette player to recharge a phone ends up in jail.

[samatman]

fundamentally, I agree. But keep in mind, skimming ATMs is a fine way to end up in jail. There is plenty of genuine crime one may commit with a knack for electronics.

[edent]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Having thought about it, hand cranked and solar chargers are fairly cheap and small.

[IgorPartola]

Why don't they put some type of device that suppresses the GSM frequencies near each cell? Not that I am advocating this, just wondering why they haven't done that.

[cdjk]

In the US that would be illegal, and get you in serious trouble with the FCC.

What is possible, however, is for the prison to run its own cell tower with whitelisted IMEIs - i.e. only the guards' phones.