COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina prison officials may soon get the tool they have chased for more than a decade. On Nov. 19, the Federal Communications Commission is set to decide on final rules that would let state prisons and local jails jam cellphone signals inside their walls, Chairman Brendan Carr announced Wednesday.
Federal prisons can already block signals, but a federal ban on interfering with authorized wireless service has kept state lockups from doing the same. The commission first put the idea out for public comment in September 2025. If the rules pass, jamming would be allowed, not required, and each prison system would have to apply to the commission and lay out its plan before switching anything on.
Corrections Director Joel Anderson has said he wants jamming at all 21 state prisons and that the department is ready to move once approval comes. Tests at Broad River Correctional Institution, first in 2019 and again a few months ago, showed phones lost service in housing units and got it back once carried outside, without spilling over beyond prison grounds, according to the department.
The stakes are high in South Carolina, where state officials say inmates have used smuggled phones to run extortion and sextortion schemes, direct drug operations and arrange attacks on people outside. The push gained urgency in 2010, when a captain who worked at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville survived being shot six times at home in an attack an inmate arranged using a contraband phone.
Since July, Anderson said, officers have taken more than 3,000 smuggled phones from inmates statewide. Federal officials estimate that about 25,000 phones are seized from jails and prisons nationwide each year.
Lawmakers have also put $18.5 million across two years into systems that pinpoint phone signals inside prisons, but shutting phones off that way means reporting each device to carriers one at a time. U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling, a former corrections director, called the proposed change the biggest step the commission could take for public safety. Carr said it will not solve the problem alone but gives officials a tool they have long been denied.
Section: More Lexington SC crime news
Filed under: Lexington SC Public Safety News
