6/27/2010 6:05 PM ET

Kevin Johnson

USA TODAY

State corrections officials are linking networks of corrupt prison employees to thousands of illicit cellphones being smuggled to inmates in the nation's largest prison systems, according to the officials and public records.The workers, including guards, cooks and clerical workers, represent the most troubling source of the prohibited phones in an increasingly lucrative smuggling operation that also includes criminal gangs and prisoners' family members, state officials say. 

"It's only getting worse," says Texas prisons Inspector General John Moriarty. 

Prison employees earn $500 or more for each of the phones, which have become ubiquitous from minimum security camps to death row, says Richard Subia, California's deputy director of adult prisons. 

Subia says inmates use the phones to keep drugs flowing into the prisons, facilitate escapes and direct criminal activity on the outside. 

The problem may be most acute in California, the nation's largest prison system, where there is no criminal law — only prison regulations — directly prohibiting the smuggling of cellphones to inmates. 

Last year, 300 employees were disciplined for suspected cellphone trafficking to inmates; about 100 workers were dismissed. An additional 150 employees have been disciplined this year. In one 2009 case, Subia says, a guard confessed to earning $100,000 in kickbacks during one 12-month period. 

Because there is no criminal law, the guard resigned and could not be forced to return the money, Subia says. Last year, California prison officials confiscated 6,995 phones, up from 2,800 in 2008.

Among states reporting problems:

• Texas. Since 2007, 230 employees have been disciplined for cellphone-related infractions. In the past five years, 45 employees have been arrested on criminal charges, including bribery, for trafficking phones to inmates. 

• New Jersey. Two weeks ago, state prosecutors charged a prison cook along with 39 others — a mix of prisoners and outside associates — linked to the Bloods criminal gang with smuggling phones and drugs to inmates. The charges were announced just a week after New Jersey Prisons Commissioner Gary Lanigan urged Congress to pass a law that would permit technology designed to jam cellphone signals in prisons. 

"The proliferation of (prison) cellphones … in New Jersey and throughout the United States has become an epidemic," Lanigan wrote, and some prison workers have been "compromised." 

The state does not track discipline for cellphone infractions, but phone seizures in New Jersey jumped from 75 in 2008 to 575 last year, prison spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer says.

  • South Carolina. Prison spokesman Josh Gelinas says state officials in 2003 attempted to discourage staffers from smuggling contraband, including cellphones, by installing metal detectors at prison entrances. He believes the detectors have been effective, but phones continue to pour in.