Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 21, 2025. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

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The Federal Communications Commission this week advanced a proposal for censorship that received far less attention than chair Brendan Carr’s “mafioso” approach to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. But it will likely result in a communication crackdown that does more harm to a far more vulnerable population — denying incarcerated people one of the few tools available to expose abuse in America’s most secretive institutions.

At a meeting on Tuesday, the FCC agreed to move forward with a proposal to allow prisons to jam contraband cellphones. Cellphone jammers are otherwise illegal devices that disrupt cellphone signals and effectively disable phones within range of the jammer.

The commission was answering the call from Arkansas officials, who invited Carr to tour a state prison where officials claimed incarcerated individuals used contraband cellphones to coordinate violent criminal activities. After the September 5 tour with the state’s Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sen. Tom Cotton, Carr announced his plans for a crackdown, claiming, without data, that “the worst possible offenders” use contraband cellphones to coordinate violence outside prison walls.

As a person who has been incarcerated for over 25 years, and has had extensive exposure to contraband cellphones — including using them to expose horrific conditions and force reform — I can attest that these accusations were exaggerated and preposterous.

While there may be isolated incidents where incarcerated individuals have used contraband cellphones to commit crimes, my experience tells me they’re far more often used to connect with loved ones or to hold rogue prison officials accountable. In my opinion, it is the latter that’s driving this FCC push, not public safety.

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Carr and Cotton doubled down on their claims of chaos in an op-ed for the New York Post this week. It included a couple anecdotes — tragic, of course — but no evidence that contraband phones are frequently used to coordinate violence or that those responsible for the cited offenses couldn’t have used other means to commit their crimes.

Historically, prison officials have had little trouble convincing lawmakers that crackdowns on incarcerated people’s communications are needed to protect the public’s safety. Like in the outside world, where officials invoke “national security” to silence their critics, the majority of these campaigns have really been about shielding prison officials from accountability.

This deceptive tactic is again on display.

Contraband cellphones have become a reliable tool for incarcerated journalists to report accurate news events and expose the harsh realities within correctional facilities.

This is the focus of the documentary “The Alabama Solution,” premiering October 10 on HBO. The film highlights the unchecked culture of violence and abuse of power within the Alabama Department of Corrections.

It shows how disturbing video footage of forced labor, drug-related violence, prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and staff assaults were captured via contraband cellphone and released to the media. This footage fueled a class action lawsuit against the state of Alabama over its prisons’ system of slave labor as well as the ongoing Department of Justice investigation over abuses in Alabama’s prisons, including horrific assaults by corrections officers.

In the throes of the Covid pandemic, I used a contraband cellphone as a last-ditch effort to report Texas prison officials’ alarmingly inadequate response to the virus, which was causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of incarcerated individuals and staff members.

That video footage was incorporated into a local ABC News documentary called “No Way Out.” That reporting embarrassed prison officials so badly it compelled them to implement and follow the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those changes could not have happened without contraband cellphones.

Fearmongering to thwart attempts to hold prison officials accountable is not a new phenomenon. This same deceptive trick was used in the 1990s to restrict incarcerated individuals’ rights to file lawsuits against prison officials. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, created insurmountable hurdles for incarcerated people to file, win, or settle a successful civil rights lawsuit.

Early procedural dismissals under the PLRA also deny outside journalists, whose access to prisons and the people who live there is extremely limited, the benefit of examining court files to find evidence of wrongdoing.

The current president files more frivolous lawsuits than practically any prisoner.

Prison officials in the ’90s exaggerated the number of frivolous lawsuits incarcerated individuals filed against prison officials in the same fashion they are currently overstating the usage of contraband cellphones to coordinate violent crimes. There’s no evidence-based data to support either accusation. And while the powerless face baseless censorship and retribution, the powerful actually commit the offenses we’re accused of in plain sight and with impunity. For example, the current president files more frivolous lawsuits than practically any prisoner, and the secretary of defense uses encrypted messaging to evade public records laws.

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There are a number of root causes of violence among incarcerated people: trauma, mental illness, addiction, depression, poor living conditions, abuse by prison staff, lack of coping skills, and so on. Contraband cellphones rank extremely low on the list — and yet, that’s the issue the government chooses to address, not the severe shortcomings in prisons’ efforts to promote personal growth, emotional management, and problem solving.

Regulations that rob incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent. Just ask those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cellphones.

Give journalists meaningful access to prisons and prison records, give incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world and document abuses without censorship and retaliation, and I’ll never use a contraband cellphone again. Or better yet, don’t commit those abuses at all.

The post The Latest FCC Censorship Push No One Is Talking About Targets Incarcerated People appeared first on The Intercept.

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