Call to ban sale of mini mobile phones

It's kind of funny to ban an item that's already being smuggled in through a ban. Seems like it might just add another layer to the smuggling scheme. We'll eventually get to a point where the phone travels from assembly line to prison cell entirely within people's butts.

Why not just let prisoners have free access to the phone? This has never made sense to me.

Wouldn&#x27;t it be a much better idea to build prisons at places that simply have no cell coverage? (if necessary make it a law for such a region - this would also make such regions good places for electrosensitive people to settle).<p>Considering that it is very problematic to use jammers and hardly possible to ban sales, too (if it becomes impossible to sell them directly, people will start to sell them from Shenzhen, which does not change the problem), this is probably the best option.

The article seems like it&#x27;s sensationalising a little bit and I can&#x27;t quite work out the purpose.<p>&gt; &quot;Beat the BOSS&quot; phones can be bought for £25, but are reportedly changing hands for up to £500 inside jails.<p>This is ostensibly an article about phones being on sale on online marketplaces and being advertised explicitly for smuggling.<p>So, let&#x27;s search Amazon UK: &quot;beat the BOSS phone&quot;, there&#x27;s one phone that looks like it&#x27;s small. Granted, it does say that it&#x27;s 99.9% plastic. Nowhere in the description is it marketed as being to beat the body scanner. BOSS isn&#x27;t mentioned.<p>The second result is a Nokia 105, which I&#x27;m fairly sure is not what the article is talking about. Ebay&#x27;s not-yet-taken-down listings are a little more explicit with one of the two listings referring to a &quot;cell&quot; and &quot;Boss.&quot; Arguably, &quot;Boss&quot; could refer to, say, the boss at work. Maybe choosing that as an acronym for the scanners wasn&#x27;t such a great idea after all.<p>Questions a journalist might have been expected to have found answers for:<p>A minister has claimed this, so is it plausible? Could there be another agenda? Is it a distraction?<p>The claimed battery life is 5 days. How are these being charged?<p>Is there a legitimate use for such a small phone?<p>Will extending a ban to outside likely be effective given that, say, drugs are also banned outside prison? The article does not mention drugs other than as contraband.<p>Why are they £500 if these things are routinely changing hands and can be obtained for so little and are so easy to smuggle?<p>Who do the inmates pay the £500 to? How?<p>How are they smuggled? Visitors seems unlikely, because the risk of getting caught is high.<p>Why is there no analysis of the widespread claims spanning decades that prison guards have been involved in many smuggling operations?<p>The media has been running stories for months about drones (i.e. quadcopters) being used to smuggle stuff into prisons. Why is there no mention of drones or any synonyms in this article?

Don&#x27;t these also have a legit use for people like journalists, who may also require a covert means of communication?

Seems a little ridiculous to me, just install IMSI catchers in the prison, and you can monitor and&#x2F;or block calls from any phone whatever the size or composition.

Couldn’t you use a gsm jammer inside the prison instead?

In my part of the world they are talking about shutting down the 2G network in the next few years. Since these small phones run on that network the UK authorities might want to check to see if the problem is going to go away on its own.

Why not make Faraday cages in prisons, or use cell phone blockers?