Canada's prison officials are struggling to stop a flood of contraband cellphones being smuggled into federal institutions.

A pile of contraband cellphones seized from prisoners. (CBC)

A CBC News investigation has found a growing number of the devices are winding up in the hands of inmates who use them to stay in touch with the outside world — even to direct criminal empires and plot escapes from inside prison.

Over the last two years, prison guards have seized 129 cellphones from 57 facilities coast-to-coast, according to Corrections Canada records obtained by CBC through access-to-information requests.

Many prison officials believe the true number of phones stashed inside correctional facilities is much higher — possibly in the thousands.

"We've seen from our 2008-2009 [data] a huge increase in the last year in cellphones that are coming in," says Mike Hanly, the warden at Alberta's Drumheller Institution.

In the past year alone, 41 cellphones were gathered at the medium-security facility, located about 140 kilometres northeast of Calgary, says Hanly.

Phones allow unmonitored access

"It could be to speak with a girlfriend or family, but quite often it's used to maintain their criminal activity, whether that's drug dealing, distribution or whatever it may be," Hanly says. Mike Hanly, warden at Drumheller Institution, says many of his inmates are tech-savvy, and a significant number are gang members. (CBC)

Hanly notes that at the Drumheller Institution, many of the 630 inmates are tech-savvy, half of them are under 30, and nearly one-fifth are gang members.

In Canada, there have been numerous cases of inmates caught organizing drug deals, directing criminal organizations and even plotting escapes over mobile phones.

Last year, a murderer escaped from a minimum-security cell in Kingston, Ont., after the prison's psychologist, with whom the inmate was having an affair, supplied him with a cellphone and helped plot his escape. Police arrested the prisoner, Andrew Wood, five days after his June 13 escape.

The prison psychologist, Erin Danto, also ended up behind bars with a two-year sentence after pleading guilty to criminal breach of trust and accessory to an escape.

Vic Toews, Canada's minister of public safety, says he has raised the problem of contraband items smuggled into federal facilities with officials.

"The current situation is clearly unacceptable," he says. "The government is serious about taking steps to ensure that inmates are not getting access to contraband, including the cellphones which allow them to direct further crimes inside and outside of prisons."

Smuggled by gangs, thrown over wall

Smuggling is a "high risk, high reward" effort, Hanly says, committed by visitors, inmates on day passes, or even corrupt prison staff. "You can get upwards of $2,000, $2,500 for a smuggled cellphone," Hanly says. "[Cellphones] are very small; they are easy to conceal."

Corrections Canada is experimenting at prison entrances with the use of special chairs equipped with metal detectors designed to detect electronic devices hidden inside body cavities.

Drumheller has also had a number of recent cases where smuggled contraband was simply thrown over the prison walls to waiting inmates.

"We had a 750 ml soap bottle that was packed with tobacco and a cellphone," Hanly said. "It was thrown over the fence."

Once inside the prison, the phones fuel an underground economy.

"It's usually a well-seasoned con [who controls the phones]" says Ontario Provincial Police Det.-Sgt. Jim Gorry of the joint forces penitentiary squad in Kingston. "They basically rent it out to you to use to make phone calls to facilitate whatever you want to do."

In one recent case, Gorry says, police seized one cellphone and discovered it had been used to place 7,000 phone calls each month.

"That's quite a large number of conversations that nobody knows about," Gorry says, adding that it also represents a hefty income for the inmate holding the phone.

And if inmates can't cover their cellphone bills, Gorry says it can lead to additional crimes, such as extortions.

Officials may jam signals

Prison officials in Canada and the United States are experimenting with electronic equipment that scans prisons, searching for electronic phone signals.

That has done little, however, to stem the growing numbers, since inmates are quick to hide or dispose of the devices when guards conduct lockdowns or searches.

OPP Det.-Sgt. Jim Gorry of the penitentiary squad in Kingston, Ont., says jamming cellphone signals at prisons would help solve the problems caused by the devices. (CBC)

"We'd like to see some type of jamming device installed in order to shut down the usage of cellphones within the prisons … it would assist us greatly," Gorry says.

Howard Melamed, chief executive of CellAntenna, a company that sells wireless jamming equipment to prisons worldwide, says federal regulators in both Canada and the U.S. are still assessing whether they should allow jamming of cellphone signals around prisons.

"The bottom line is the methods they use to find these phones … which is using dogs to sniff, cavity searches, metal detectors, they are not very efficient," says Melamed.

"Our experience has been that jamming is really the best control. It eliminates them."

Industry Canada does not currently allow jamming devices at prisons on a regular basis, partly because of concerns that it could interfere with cellphone signals outside the prisons. The federal department is examining the idea.