Kevin Johns, along with Kim Johns and Kathy Bowling, speaks about when their son, Jared Johns, died by suicide because of a prison-run sextortion scheme during a news conference outside Broad River Correctional Institution on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. (Skylar Laird/Staff)
COLUMBIA — Jared Johns thought he was receiving phone calls from the angry father of a 17-year-old girl who he had been messaging on a dating website.
What the 24-year-old Army veteran and father of two didn’t know was that it was a scam, and the man on the other end of that call was already behind bars.
“To most, this may sound a little fishy, but to a PTSD sufferer, it was a literal death sentence,” his father, Kevin Johns, said during a Tuesday news conference.
Jared Johns died by suicide Sept. 11, 2018.
A law celebrated Tuesday with a ceremonial signing is meant to help prevent similar deaths by stopping crimes committed with cellphones from behind the razor wire of the state’s prisons, Gov. Henry McMaster and other officials said.
Around 1,500 cellphones sit on a table outside Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. (Skylar Laird/Staff)
The law, which McMaster actually signed in May, specifies criminal penalties for prisoners caught with a cellphone.
Before May 13, the Department of Corrections used a law that broadly prohibited contraband in prisons to declare cellphones illegal for inmates.
While department policy counts electronics as contraband, a law with graduated penalties will make it easier to prosecute people violating it, said Corrections Director Bryan Stirling.
“It’s always been against our rules, but now it’s against the law,” Stirling said.
Under the general contraband law, a prisoner’s punishment for having a cellphone was usually decided in magistrate’s court, officials said. Punishment might be loss of privileges
Now, a prisoner caught the first time with a phone or other electronic device other than their prison-issued tablet must get up to a year tacked onto their sentence. Each subsequent violation is a felony that adds up to five additional years to a sentence.
Any inmate convicted of committing a crime using a contraband cellphone can spend up to a decade longer in prison under the law.
“The bottom line is, anybody that has a cellphone in prison is committing a crime, and now we can hold them accountable, and we can turn those phones off,” Stirling said.
Crimes in prison
In Johns’ case, two prisoners had created a profile on a dating website pretending to be a 17-year-old girl. They then called Johns and threatened to report him to the police for solicitation of a minor if he didn’t send them more than $1,000.
The prisoners called again the next day pretending to be a sheriff’s deputy and told Johns to do what the father said or risk arrest.
“Soldiers are instilled with loyalty, pride and honor and are held to a higher standard, and that’s why he and many others were targeted,” Kevin Johns said. “This scam put him into a place feeling so low that he thought suicide was his only way out.”
This sort of scam was common in South Carolina prisons at the time.
About two months after Johns’ death, officials announced indictments against 15 people, including five prisoners, who received $560,000 in extorted money from 442 military service members they targeted across the country, The Post and Courier reported.
“Having an unmonitored, open line of communication allows inmates to continue orchestrating illegal acts, both inside and outside the prison fence, and we’ve seen repeatedly the tragic results,” said Mark Keel, chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
Inmates have used cellphones to traffic drugs and order killings on the outside, officials said.
Kim Johns, Kevin Johns and Kathy Bowling, holding photos of Jared Johns, watch as Gov. Henry McMaster ceremoniously signs the bill outside Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. (Skylar Laird/Staff)
Prisoners ran a massive international drug trafficking enterprise in prison, leading to convictions for 40 people who were working inside and outside of the state’s prisons.
In 2010, inmates ordered a hit on Captain Robert Johnson, an anti-contraband officer who was shot six times at his Sumter home. The law is named after Johnson, who survived the attack and has since retired.
“I promised (the Johns) and I promised Captain Johnson at the time that we would come up with a solution,” Stirling said. “This is the solution that we’ve come up with.”
Stopping cellphones
Stirling’s ideal solution would be to jam phone signals completely within prisons, making cellphones useless. But federal law allows that technology only at federal facilities.
Stirling has sought permission for years to do so at state prisons, but the cellphone industry opposed the effort.
The Federal Communications Commission agreed in 2021 to allow a workaround. While the state’s still now allowed to shut off all cellphones, they can use a different technology to identify phones making calls from inside prisons. That allows corrections officials to report those phones to the carriers supporting them, getting them shut off.
Since installing the technology at Lee Correctional Institution in July 2023, officials have deactivated 1,500 phones at the high- and medium-security facility. With just over 1,100 inmates housed there, that suggests repeat offenders, Stirling said.
At the same time, the number of calls made using the monitored wall phones at Lee has increased nearly 70%, as inmates use the legal phones to contact loved ones instead of their contraband cellphones, Stirling said.
Shutting down phones doesn’t necessarily get them out of inmates’ hands.
Persistent inmates will continue finding ways to get phones into the prisons. But it increases demand and reduces supply, making it harder for inmates to get ahold of cellphones, which can sell for as much as $10,000 in a prison, Stirling said.
Using $7 million in one-time funding and $3.8 million recurring money approved by legislators in July, the corrections department is working to install the system at another six prisons, Stirling said.
Putting it in place at all 21 facilities will cost $34 million, officials said. That includes $21.3 million to install the technology and $12.6 million annually to continue running it.
The corrections department will ask again for the rest of the funding, Stirling said. The issue is a high priority for legislators, said House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, as well as for McMaster.
The law signed Tuesday is a good start, McMaster said.
“We think that’s going to have a big impact,” McMaster said.