Dog's new trick: finding inmates' cellphones
 Sgt. David Brosky, a Maryland corrections officer, stands by as his dog Alba inspects a computer monitor that contains a cellphone. , (Dan Morse/Washington Post) |
THE WASHINGTON POST
We could all use one from time to time: a dog that can find the darn cellphone.
Maryland has three. Their job is to sniff out phones smuggled into prisons.
"Seek," Sgt. David Brosky told his dog Alba this week, offering a public demonstration at the former Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.
Alba made her way through an unoccupied prison cell until she came upon a rolled-up pair of jeans on a bed. She sat, a signal she had found something.
"Good girrrrrrrrrrl," said Brosky, a corrections officer, handing the dog a ball, a reward for finding the black cellphone tucked in the pants.
The state's trained dogs -- Tazz and Rudd, along with Alba -- could be the solution to a problem facing prison administrators nationwide, a solution taking hold in the Washington region.
Smuggled cellphones allow inmates to run criminal enterprises, threaten witnesses and warn fellow inmates about the movements of correctional officers, state officials said.
"Cellphones are perhaps the worst type of contraband," Gary D. Maynard, Maryland's secretary of public safety and correctional services, said. "In most cases, they provide an easy, continuing connection back to the inmate's life on the street."
As cellphones have become smaller, they have become easier to hide. They are smuggled into prisons by inmates on work-release programs, visiting family members, contractors working in the facilities and corrections officers, state officials said. In some cases, phones have been tossed over fences to prisoners, officials said.
Inmates don't just use the phones; they trade and sell them, sometimes for as much as $350.
The three Maryland dogs have been trained to smell cellphones using techniques employed to teach dogs to smell drugs. It isn't clear which parts of phones the dogs detect, but the animals probably take in a combination of odors from various sections, said Maj. Peter Anderson, who heads up the state's K-9 operations for prisons.
It's harder for dogs to detect cellphones than marijuana, Anderson said. But it was clear that Alba and Tazz (Rudd didn't participate) were up to the challenge.
The dogs were asked to find phones more than a half-dozen times and failed only once to find their target in 30 seconds. At one point, Alba, a Belgian malinois, passed small TVs and a VCR before stopping at a TV that had a cellphone inside.
In the past year, the Virginia prison system has had six dogs trained to detect cellphones. "It seems to work very well for us so far," said Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
Virginia hired a California dog-training company, All States K-9 Detection. The owner, Harlen "Lamb" Lambert, said "everybody wants to know" how to train the dogs. It's a secret he's not about to give away, he said.
Lambert said inmates have been known to conceal phones in jars of peanut butter and wrap them in waterproof plastic and submerge them in toilets, two tricks he said do not fool dogs he has trained. Lambert said he has trained 11 dogs, including Virginia's, and is training 13 others.
This month, the D.C. Department of Corrections plans to have Maryland officials train its drug-finding dogs to sniff out cellphones. "No matter how long it takes, we're going to get proficiency on this," said Devon Brown, director of the department.
Anderson said he had heard about cellphone-sniffing dogs in Great Britain and figured he could train dogs himself. He started in April.
Tazz, a male springer spaniel, was trained first, because of his history of skilled drug work. He was trained with a variety of phones. After two weeks, Anderson said he thought to himself, "This is doable."
Anderson predicted that the use of such dogs will become more popular.
"I think every state will be doing this in a short time," he said.
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