Although there are uses of mobiles for criminal activity and witness intimidation, there are also lots of times when its used to keep in touch with their spouse because its the only way they can regularly keep in contact due to the extortionate prices the prisoners pay for calls.
A prisoner maybe earning £10 a week for working in prison jobs but phone calls cost 50p a minute. Even more for international calls if the prisoner is a foreign national and their family lives abroad.
Often in older Victorian prisons there will be perhaps 5 phones for use on a wings of 100 prisoners and they will only be able to use them during association times, which is usually just a couple of hours a day. Also you do get fights occurring because someone believed the person on the phone was taking too long and there are several prisoners waiting for the phone to be available.
If all prisoners had access to a phone in their cells and be able to get reasonable prices for calls or even be given say 1 hour of free phone credit a month to pre-approved numbers, such as their family, friends and legal team. As it has been well proved that good support structure helps with rehabilitation and would at least reduce the number of prisoners seeking to use contraband phones to just speak to their family.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
