Ex-Jail Guard Shot Six Occasions Hopeful In Cellphone Jamming

[ad_1] by Jeroslyn JoVonn September 30, 2025

A former South Carolina jail guard focused for stopping contraband smuggling hopes federal legislation will quickly enable cellphone jamming in prisons.

A former corrections officer, who has spent the previous 15 years urging the Federal Communications Fee (FCC) to allow cellphone jamming in state prisons, is now hopeful as approval seems more and more doubtless.

After Robert Johnson, a former guard at South Carolina’s notoriously violent Lee Correctional Establishment, was focused in a success orchestrated by inmates utilizing smuggled cellphones, he devoted his life to altering the legislation to permit cellphone jamming know-how in prisons. After enduring greater than 30 surgical procedures from the accidents he sustained within the taking pictures, Johnson is now, for the primary time, cautiously optimistic that the FCC will approve cellphone jammers, doubtlessly stopping others from going through the same destiny.

“If that is what it took to get this legislation modified, then it was price it,” Johnson advised NBC Information.

On Sept. 30, the FCC permitted a plan to advance using cellphone jamming in state prisons. The choice opens the coverage for public remark, with a last vote scheduled for a later date.

It’s nice information for Johnson. As a corrections officer, Johnson’s job was to cease inmates from smuggling cellphones, medication, and different contraband. That’s when he found that an inmate had orchestrated a focused assault, leaving him shot six occasions within the chest and abdomen. Although he hoped to return to work after restoration, his accidents have been too extreme to proceed.

“My coronary heart was tousled — my liver, my lungs, diaphragm, proper leg, left leg,” Johnson, 72, recalled. “I had the whole lot fallacious, from the nerve injury and trauma of these bullets.”

Johnson sees a cellphone within the palms of gang members and inmates as a “weapon of mass destruction.” For many years, he has spoken at legislation enforcement occasions nationwide and testified thrice earlier than the Federal Communications Fee, advocating to vary a 1934 federal legislation that at present bars anybody besides the U.S. authorities from interfering with public airwaves.

The previous correctional officer believes cellphone jamming know-how may cease inmates from orchestrating crimes from behind bars. At a press convention earlier this month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr defined that the legislation “prohibits the jamming of approved communication.” Having heard Johnson’s story firsthand when he labored for the fee as an lawyer in 2017, Carr stated he's now pushing to make sure that contraband cellphone alerts are now not thought of “approved.”

“As soon as contraband cellphone use shouldn't be a certified communication, then the federal legislation is now not a prohibition to jamming it,” Carr stated. “And it’s effectively throughout the FCC’s authority to provide that studying to federal legislation.”

Nevertheless, wi-fi business teams proceed to push again, warning that jamming know-how may disrupt alerts past jail partitions and intervene with emergency communications between guards and paramedics. In its place, business teams level to managed entry techniques, which let officers detect and remotely disable smuggled telephones.

However former South Carolina state prisons director Bryan Stirling, a staunch supporter of cellphone jamming, says that when these techniques have been put in in six state prisons in 2018 after a riot at Lee Correctional Establishment, inmates nonetheless discovered methods to make use of contraband telephones. He argues that jammers are far simpler, immediately slicing off all cell communication.