reply c/p from HN: Cells in UK jails are not barren concrete-and-metal things like in the movies. They have a sink, a desk, a kettle, a TV, a (usually padded) chair and a bed. You charge your phone by plugging it in :). Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up. Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems. Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment. I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate people's desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.