“It’s an endemic evil”: in prisons, cell phones are omnipresent

They are strictly prohibited, and yet cell phones are omnipresent in French prisons. Before his spectacular and bloody escape on May 14 in Eure, during which two prison officers were killed, Mohamed Amra, who had become the most wanted fugitive in France, himself made a lot of telephone calls while behind bars.

The repeat offender, involved in drug trafficking, sometimes spent several hours on the phone a day, completely illegally. For the year 2023 alone, the guards found nine cell phones hidden in his cell.

Impressive figures

For Joaquim Pueyo, mayor (DVG) of Alençon who has managed some of the largest French remand centers, eradicating this phenomenon is a priority. “It is an endemic evil in prisons and it endangers security. It does not give much meaning to the sentence, we cannot accept it”he believes.

And the numbers are impressive. Last year, the prison administration got its hands on 53,000 smartphones and telephone accessories. France currently has nearly 79,000 prisoners.

Drug traffickers targeted

The State particularly wants to attack drug lords. Yet placed in solitary confinement, many continue to manage their deal points and even sponsor assassinations. For example, it was from the Santé prison in Paris, where he was incarcerated, that Mohamed Amra, according to the judicial police, ordered the murder of a drug trafficker, killed in 2022 in Marseille.

Justice could therefore equip traffickers' cells with wave-blocking suitcases. “These are suitcases, apparently a hundred, that we would place in the isolation areas, where we will place these sensitive detainees, who have the means to escape or continue to traffic outside”explains Emmanuel Baudin, general secretary of the Force Ouvrière Justice union.

However, turning a blind eye to the phones allows some guards to buy social peace in overcrowded prisons. Cell phones are also a godsend for the police, who regularly wiretap them.

Soon new security gates?

Many of these devices are introduced by families during visiting rooms, because full and systematic searches of prisoners no longer exist. To detect possible phone intrusion attempts, “we must replace full searches with new generation millimeter gates which are very expensive, but which make it possible to control what a detainee has at the end of the visiting room”judge Joaquim Pueyo.

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Since January, the State has spent nearly 30 million euros on technical resources to combat cell phones in prison.