Costa Rican prisons are often just temporary residences for criminals who are sentenced to extended jail time, but manage to get their sentences reduced and return to their lives of crime in short order. Many maintain their criminal activities while serving prison time, remaining the leaders of their gangs, and continuing whatever illegal activities they were involved in on the outside. Remaining in contact with their gangs and clients is only possible via cell phones – and cell phones are prohibited in prison.
Cats have been used to smuggle in cell phones at both Costa Rica’s largest prison La Reforma, and at the Women’s Prison, El Buen Pastor, but guards have now become aware of this trick, and are on the lookout for stray cats on the prison grounds.

According to Insight Crime, prisoners have now developed a new way of getting the cell phones they need. They are bribing the homeless near the prison to carry the cell phones into the prison during visiting hours, hidden either in their rectums or vaginas. Before the homeless are put to work in this way, they are reportedly given a shower, a good meal, and a fresh set of clothing.
The group responsible for this new approach were discovered after a man was attacked outside La Reforma while waiting in the visitor line, because he refused to smuggle a cell phone into the prison. He managed to alert the authorities to the new scheme. While it is unknown how long this method of smuggling has been in use, it reportedly was begun by a brother and sister who used homeless near the prisons to smuggle both drugs and cell phones onto the premises in their body cavities. They were also allegedly involved in human trafficking, with cell phone smuggling easier to arrange, and almost as profitable. Criminal groups pay between $100 – $700 for phones which are then sold to inmates for as much as $1,400 each.

Wrote Insight Crime, “Cell phone smuggling by gangs and their accomplices is rampant in Costa Rica’s prisons, and the abuse suffered by homeless men and women is another example of vulnerable populations being exploited in the service of organized crime.” Pablo Bertozzi, Costa Rica’s prison director, commented about this method of smuggling, “the black market trade moves a lot of money.” Some 10,014 phones were confiscated in Costa Rican prisons between 2015-2018, probably only a fraction of the phones circulating within the prison system.

If prisoners are caught either smuggling or using illegal cell phones, they are given light punishment, or just a warning. Costa Rica has tried to ban cell phone usage in prisons since 2016, but attempts to block cell phone signals have failed, due to protests by surrounding neighborhoods that the ban also impacted the cell signal of residents.
Besides the abuse of the homeless in the pursuit of criminal activities within prisons, authorities are also concerned that prisons have become training institutions for those held prisoner. Insight Crime wrote, “The jails have become incubators of criminal activity; finishing schools for hardened criminals and places where powerful criminal groups organize, train up their members, recruit and plan further crimes.”

At the very least, criminals emerge from Costa Rican correctional institutions proficient in extortion and other phone scam tactics, skills they can put to good use on the outside.

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