The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Nov. 19 on a rule change that would let states and local governments seek permission to block cellphone signals inside prisons and jails, a technology South Carolina has pushed for years after inmates used contraband phones to order a hit on a corrections officer. If approved, the measure would not force any state to jam signals — it would simply give corrections authorities the option, provided they can show through testing that the jamming stays contained to the facility.
A Decade-Long Fight Rooted in a 2010 Shooting
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the vote during an appearance in Little Rock, Arkansas, framing it as the culmination of a fight South Carolina has waged for roughly a decade, according to SC Daily Gazette. Carr has credited the advocacy of Robert Johnson, a former South Carolina Department of Corrections captain who was shot six times at his Sumter home in 2010 after a hitman hired by inmates using an illegal cellphone kicked in his front door, with helping drive the push for the rule change, as reported by NBC News. Johnson, who had worked as a contraband captain at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, survived the attack but was never able to return to his job because of the extent of his injuries, and he still experiences chronic pain and continues to undergo surgeries related to the shooting, NBC News reports.
Carr said the public has not grasped the scope of the contraband phone problem behind bars, according to WLTX. He put numbers to it: nearly 500,000 inmates nationwide now have access to contraband cellphones, and roughly 25,000 phones are seized in jails every year, per masslive.com. Carr said some of the worst offenders use the devices to order hits and orchestrate kidnappings, and that illegal phones increasingly turn up in drug operations and child sexual exploitation cases, masslive.com reports.
South Carolina Ready to Apply the Moment the Rule Changes
South Carolina Department of Corrections Director Joel Anderson said he plans to seek permission to install jamming devices across the state's 21 prisons as soon as the federal vote takes place. Anderson said illegal cellphones let criminals keep committing crimes while behind bars and argued the rule change would make all of America safer, according to the SC Daily Gazette. Under the proposal, states would still need to apply to the FCC for authorization after the commission votes, and the agency says it will work with states and cellphone providers to ensure proper deployment once approval is granted.
The state's corrections agency has reported that inmates have used illegal cellphones to incite violence, organize escapes, demand money from victims, run criminal enterprises and even order murders. Those findings track with a South Carolina State Grand Jury report that said inmates used contraband phones to coordinate criminal activity, including methamphetamine trafficking across six counties, per WBTV.
Testing at Broad River and the Technical Safeguards
South Carolina has already tested micro-jamming equipment at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, including another test earlier in the summer of 2026, and the state corrections agency said both tests showed the technology could block signals inside the prison without affecting signals outside, per WLTX's reporting. Carr said targeted applications focused on inmate living quarters and similar areas could be 100 percent effective, WLTX reports. The FCC's proposal would also require testing to prove that any jamming effects stay confined to the designated geographic area, according to masslive.com.
South Carolina's push for jamming follows years of investment in other anti-contraband technology. State legislators spent $18.5 million over two years on a system that tracks cellphone signals inside prisons, and South Carolina was the first state in the nation to adopt that tracking technology, the SC Daily Gazette notes. Even so, managed access systems installed in six South Carolina prisons in 2018 following a riot at Lee Correctional Institution did not solve the problem: former state prisons director Bryan Stirling has said inmates still managed to use contraband phones despite those systems, according to NBC News.
Support Beyond South Carolina, and What Comes Next
The push for jamming authority extends past South Carolina's borders. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr have both pushed for the rule change, according to The Verge. Arkansas Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace and Senator Tom Cotton were also tied to the announcement in Little Rock. Carr said the proposed change removes a federal obstacle that has kept state and local officials from deploying jamming technology, and that cellphone jamming has been denied to law enforcement and corrections officials for too long, according to the SC Daily Gazette and WLTX.
The FCC says it will release a draft decision publicly ahead of the Nov. 19 vote, according to WLTX. The commission is composed of two Republicans and one Democrat, per masslive.com. Carr said he expects the change will mark significant progress on the contraband phone problem and that the FCC will work closely with state and local officials to authorize jamming once the rule is in place.
