More than 10,000 cell phones seized in prisons in five years

More than 10,000 cell phones seized in prisons in five years



Between the years 2017 and 2021, the guards of the prisons They have located and seized 10,275 mobile phones in cellschanging rooms, workshops and unexpected corners of the prisons. The data has been added by the union of officials Acaip-UGT penitentiary, which has released this Tuesday.

This recount of searches has been carried out in the prisons of the territory that for the last five years has been under the management of the Ministry of Interior (all the prisons except the Catalan ones; this year the Euskadi government has also taken over the jurisdiction over the Basque prisons). The Secretariat for Criminal Measures and Reintegration of the Generalitat does not publish the data, which in Catalonia is usually guarded by the deputy directors of prison security.

Year 2019 was the year with the most apprehensions of this instrument, prohibited inside prisons to prevent capos and base criminals from persevering in crime or governing their criminal networks. That year, 2,585 phones smuggled into prisons were located and removed.

According to the count made by Acaip-UGTthe penitentiary centers of Algeciras and Alhaurín (Málaga) were the ones that registered the most seizures, with about 690 and 688 mobiles each. In these prisons, a good part of the preventive and convicted for the anti-drug police coups in the Gibraltar field, and those that have to do with the laundering of that criminal activity. On Albolote (Granada) 443 were seized; on Valdemoro (Madrid), 495; on Valencia (Picassent prison), 437.

Call and offend

Incarcerated criminals use mobile phones not only to keep in touch with their gangs: also to circumvent eavesdropping on your communications inside the prison. According to the prison trade union, prisoners for gender-based violence, those who committed terrorism crimes or those who belong to organized gangs are the inmates who most appreciate illegal phones, a highly valued commodity in prison.

A good part of them elude the detector of the controls at the entrance of objects to the prisons because they lack enough metallic elements to set off the alarm. The authors of the study affirm that in their searches they have found mobiles "on shoe soles, soda cans, hygienic products..."

The effective searches of these devices require, according to the union, "personnel with specialized training." Control becomes "almost impossible" because of the more than 3,000 vacancies in the staff of prison workers in this country, in addition to "a list of jobs in the centers that does not correspond to their real needs," says Acaip-UGT in a note made public this Tuesday.

Mobile phone trafficking stresses prison life in a way similar to intramural drug dealing: its high price generates debts between prisoners, and not a few moments of danger in prison life. The union has called for the proper functioning of inhibitors and detection devices in prisons to prevent inmates from using mobile phones.



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