In most jails and prisons, cellular phones are considered contraband and can be confiscated if they’re found in a prisoner’s possession. If they’re lucky, that’s the limit of the punishment. But just because something isn’t allowed doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and phones inside lockup are popular for most of the same reasons they’re popular on the outside: they’re fun, useful tools for work or communication.
Most of what I knew about illicit electronics came from press releases and news stories that offered example after example of all the bad things people could do with contraband phones, things like trafficking drugs, making threats and running scams. While it’s true those things can happen, over the past three years I’ve also seen a lot of people use their phones for good. Some use them to self-publish books or take online college classes. Others become prison reform advocates, teach computer skills, trade bitcoin or write legal briefs. I’ve seen a whole plethora of savvy and creative uses that fly in the face of stereotypes about people behind bars. “Our cell phones have saved lives,” a man in prison in South Carolina told me.
Along with communication, activism, and journalism, cell phones are popular not least because they can be used for profit (helped, not hindered, by the peculiarities of the prison economy):
Even though contraband phones can cost anywhere from around $300 to $6,000, sometimes the devices pay for themselves, because a lot of prisoners use them to earn money. One Texas prisoner I interviewed had been selling his artwork online, while others say they have used their phones to learn how to trade stocks or do online gig work. More commonly, I know guys who use their phones to get work as freelance writers. You might read their stories and not even know the author penned them from prison. Unfettered internet access makes research quicker, and one man explained that a pricey contraband phone can still end up being cheaper and more reliable than communicating in approved ways.
“Typewriter ribbons here are extortionately priced,” one federal prisoner explained. “Talk-to-text makes writing articles so much cheaper, even including the cost of the phone and the rate plan”… Some people earn money by renting out their phones or charging people to use them as hotspots to secretly connect their prison-issued tablets to the internet. “You can buy hotspot time for $1 a day,” a prisoner in one Southern state told me. “A dollar is two ramen noodle soups, and that’s how it’s paid for.”
But the most popular use for a phone in jail or prison is simply to keep in touch with friends and family outside.
When the California prisoner I spoke to got his first phone about a decade ago, the first thing he did, he said, was call his wife and ask to speak to his son. Ordinary uses like that, he said, are why most people in prison want phones.
“I mean, there are some people where you might have legitimate concerns about them having phones, and they might want to order a hit,” he said. “But in the prison I’m at, the only thing we want to order is a pizza.”
[In the past,] it was possible for a horror movie to isolate its victims by taking them slightly outside the warm glow of civilization. Classics like 1960’s Psycho, 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or 1980’s The Shining dropped the protagonists at remote houses. With no access to landlines, the characters in those movies were so removed from help or contact with the outside world, they might as well have been stranded on the Moon. Even as of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, it was plausible that a group of tech-savvy young people would venture into the woods without cellphones or a GPS tracker, and have no way to alert anyone else when their situation took a bad turn. But with upward of 75 percent of Americans owning smartphones, and upward of 95 percent owning cellphones of some kind, modern horror films have to work harder to keep their characters from summoning the police the second a maniac starts waving a chainsaw in their direction.
These days, a dead phone doesn’t just cut users off from emergency services; it also cuts them off from the conversation, the daily flow of online life that so many of us use as our primary form of contact with the outside world. In that sense, the need to kill a victim’s battery before killing the actual victim is becoming less of a predictable cliché, and more of a way of building the stakes and establishing sympathies. Horror movie audiences may find it hard to believe in Cloverfield’s group of friends fleeing a Godzilla-sized monster through the streets of New York, but they can certainly believe in a guy coming away from a party with a drained phone battery and obsessing over the need to make one last phone call before the night’s over.
Robinson talks about how this trope taps into real-world anxieties about being unable to communicate or connect with other people, whiling away necessary power with frivolous uses, and technology letting us down in key moments, but she also gestures towards something else; a peculiar sort of wish-fulfillment. She imagines a high-tech horror film in which unplugging becomes a form of escape. But we’re already longing for a retreat from our devices, notifications, internet drama, and everything that comes with it. Isn’t part of the uncanny quality of the battery death trope that it’s giving us what we want, just in a distorted form?
Smartphones have been getting more water-resistant for a while now, but this is pretty crazy. Via Ina Fried at Recode, who writes:
The phone is a successor to an earlier handset that worked only with certain types of hand soap. The washable phone can be used with a range of soaps, including foaming body wash and hand soap… Waterproof phones have long been a thing in Japan, so it’s not too much of a stretch to think there might be an appetite for soap-proof devices.
In the US, smartphones have gotten so ubiquitous as to be boring — all of them big, flat, and offering slightly different versions of the same thing. I don’t know — maybe that’s an unfair characterization. But I wish the market were just a little weirder, wilder, offering different things to different people with different needs and lives.
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