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In the dangerous cat-and-mouse game between inmates and prison guards assigned to watch them, dogs are now serving in a new crime-fighting role. Illegal cell phones have been used for years inside the wire at state institutions to orchestrate witness harassment, call out hits on rivals, run gang operations on the street and coordinate drug smuggling into locked down facilities, said Captain Peter Anderson of the Division of Correction. In other states, they've also been used to plan successful escapes. According to the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, 849 cell phones were confiscated in state prisons last year, an increase of nearly 76 percent from the previous year -- suggesting that problem has been getting worse. Girlfriends, staff, guards, work-release inmates and contractors have all been implicated in making deals to carry in concealed cell phones. In one instance in Nevada, The Associated Press reported, a dental assistant was fired for bringing a cell phone to an inmate, enabling him to plot an unexpected exit from the institution. In Texas, more than a dozen officers have been convicted of accepting bribes for cell phones and various components in recent years. In Tennessee, an inmate charged in the shooting death of a guard apparently used a phone that had been tucked in a jar of peanut butter to scheme his escape. It's in this scenario that Alba, a 2-year-old Malinois, walked into a Southern Maryland prison last Wednesday, poked her nose around and eventually found a slim cell phone hidden in a common room trash can. It's the 15th working phone, plus another dozen phone chargers and SIM cards (the device the stores user information inside cell phones), that correction officials have uncovered with Alba, Rudd, another Malinois, and Tazz, their six-year Springer Spaniel colleague, pointing the way in just the past month. They've found phones everywhere imaginable -- taped inside toilets, in books with the pages carved out and inside small televisions. Other phones have been found destroyed during searches as word of the dogs' recently acquired abilities has spread. "Oh yeah, inmates were out on the tier yelling 'Cell phone dogs, cell phone dogs,'" Alba's handler Sgt. David Brosky said of the Southern Maryland inspection. "Every inmate in the state knows we have the cell phone sniffing dogs by now," said Lt. Rodney Jordan, also of the DOC's K-9 unit. "But it doesn't matter." Inmate communication is strictly controlled. Pay phone calls inside prisons are strictly checked, and regular mail and letters are opened and read, he said. In reality, though, Anderson said, "They monitor use better than we monitor them." "With these," he said, "They text message. They send e-mails." The phones -- corrections officials have found models varying from cheap prepaid TracFones to Blackberrys -- fuel violence inside prisons and put public safety at risk on the street, Anderson stressed. "Some people have said that they use them to stay in contact with family and children and aren't that bad, but believe me not all of the calls are that benign," said Lt. Rodney Jordan, also of the K-9 unit. Jordan said that in terms of contraband, "they are at the top of the food chain." Phones can cost as much $350 in prison, with gangs demanding a surcharge be paid for each called placed. Canines have long been used to sniff for illicit drugs in prisons. (Crude alcohol, fermented from stale commissary bread and fruit and known as "jump," Anderson noted with a wry smile, can usually be detected by the officers themselves). This summer, however, Maryland became the first state in the country to start training dogs to detect cell phones, which it turns out they can distinguish from other electronic devices, such as television sets, compact disc players and computer screens. The phones have their own scent. Anderson said Virginia started a similar program in the past year, paying a California vendor to train cell phone sniffing dogs. Governor Martin O'Malley learned what Virginia was doing and asked Maryland correction officials to implement the procedure as well. Instead of purchasing trained dogs from California, Anderson, the K-9 unit commander, decided to try to train a few of the 30 dogs the DOC already employed for narcotic and bomb details. When asked who first believed that dogs' olfactory prowess might be advanced enough to pick up the scents of cell phones, Anderson and Jordan couldn't help but laugh. "I thought about this possibility three to four years ago," Anderson admitted. "Then, I thought, no way. Just not possible and I dismissed it without even trying it." "We can be a stubborn bunch," Jordan said. "We were in the middle of another big project when this was brought to us and I fought it tooth and nail." Philip Bowyer, a prison drug dog coordinator in Her Majesty's service in the United Kingdom, and his colleague, Mel Barker, are given credit for training the first mobile phone sniffing dogs in 2006. In a demonstration at a Roxbury Road warehouse on the grounds of the state prison complex in Hagerstown, Alba sniffed along a long hallway shelf of boxes, three-ring notebooks and manilla folders before uncovering a black cell phone taped to the underside of one of the metal shelves. After sitting down at the spot, she was rewarded by her handler, Sgt. David Brosky, with her favorite toy, a plastic ball, and a lot of affection and positive reinforcement. Later, after sniffing her way up and down past a half-dozen electronic devices, she located another cell phone hidden inside a small prison television. Then, she found a third phone hidden away in a heavy palette of flat cardboard sheets. "It surprised us (that the dogs can be trained to detect cell phones)," said Anderson, who has been working in correction for 20 years and in the K-9 unit for 12. "But it amazes me everyday what they can do."
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