SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Lawmakers struggling to keep cell phones away from California’s most dangerous inmates say a main obstacle is the politically powerful prison guards union, whose members would have to be paid millions of dollars extra to be searched on their way into work.
Pri
son employees, roughly half of whom are unionized guards, are the main source of smuggled phones that inmates use to run drugs and other crimes, according to legislative analysts who examined the problem last year. Unlike visitors, staff can enter the facilities without passing through metal detectors.
While union officials’ stated position is that they do not necessarily oppose searches, they cite a work requirement that corrections officers be paid for “walk time” — the minutes it takes them to get from the front gate to their posts behind prison walls.
Putting metal detectors along the route, with an airport-like regimen involving removal of steel-toed boots and equipment-laden belts, could double the walk time, adding several million dollars to officers’ collective pay each year, according to a 2008 Senate analysis.
Since then, cell phones have proliferated exponentially in California’s state lockups. This year, state Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat, is calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to “put the (search) issue on the table” in contract negotiations with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.
“Everybody coming into the state Capitol building has to go through a metal detector…. You even get searched when you go to a Lakers game,” said Padilla, who for three years has sponsored unsuccessful legislation to crack down on the contraband phones. “Why don’t we have that requirement at correctional facilities, of all places?”
Brown, whose campaign received financial support from the union and who made one of his few public appearances between the November election and his January inauguration at the union’s convention in Las Vegas, would not say whether searches are under review.
“Our office does not discuss the details of pending contract negotiations,” said Brown spokesman Evan Westrup, who noted that the prison system is testing technology to block cell phone calls in prisons.
More than 10,000 cell phones made their way into California prisons last year — up from 1,400 in 2007, said corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton. Two of those wound up in the hands of Charles Manson, who is serving a life sentence for ordering the ritualistic murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969.
The phones can fetch as much as $1,000 each behind prison walls, according to a recent state inspector general’s report, which detailed how a corrections officer made $150,000 in a single year smuggling phones to inmates. He was fired but was not prosecuted because it is not against the law to take cell phones into prison, although it is a violation of prison rules to possess them behind bars.
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