I have a question, and can't find answer anywhere on the internet. I'm 99% sure the answer is yes, but I'm new at websleuthing so heck if I know. I was going to ask this months ago, and now wish I had.
Let's say a person is in jail on some drug charge, or whatever and is very close to a much bigger case. While in the county jail, she/he confides to another inmate about what she/he heard or knows what happened to the victim/victims in the much bigger separate case she/he is very close to. (I'm thinking This person must not be very smart, right?)
Doesn't the jail monitor these conversations? I mean, isn't every word of what the inmates of the jail taped and listened to constantly, or could something get missed?
At least in Iowa, the answer is no, conversations between inmates are not routinely monitored.
The primary reasons are all practical. It's much more difficult than TV makes it seem to bug large open spaces. It's nearly impossible, in fact. What you get tends to be a muffled jumble of sounds and individual conversations are unintelligible.
Monitoring conversations between inmates and visitors is somewhat easier when the system whereby the two people sit on either side of a barrier and use telephones handsets to communicate.
Even if bugging the cells and recreational spaces were possible, there's the personnel problem. In order to effectively monitor anything, someone has to watch or listen to the conversations. I'm betting that well over 99% of what is said between inmates is boring, ordinary stuff like "can you hand me a kleenex?" Can you imagine how mind numbingly boring it would be to listen to 16 hours of that stuff per inmate per day? From the prison's point of view, each monitor is someone who has to be paid a certain wage and receive certain benefits, which mounts up fast.
Occasionally, when LE finds out there might be an inmate with knowledge of a certain crime, they will wire an individual, either an inmate or an impostor, and hope the wired individual can induce a confession. They have to be careful, though, not to do something that could be interpreted as entrapment (which is illegal and anything gotten by means of entrapment is not useable in court for any purpose). And even wiring someone is not a foolproof way to catch both sides of a conversation, depending on acoustics, etc. Quite often, what an individual wire ends up with is a lovely recording of their own voice with muffled sounds for the other half of the recording.
Finally, keep in mind that many jail and prison inmates have way too much time on their hands and are incredibly bored. It is not unusual for an inmate to get to the point where they are so desperate for something to alleviate the boredom of the usual day that they will say they know something they really don't.
Or inmates looking for some way of plea bargaining for pending charges will try trading knowledge of alleged confessions by cell mates. This has been shown to be a factor in a significant number of false convictions. When you take everything away from someone, by definition you leave that person with nothing to lose. A certain number will try out a fake confession, knowing that the worst that can happen is nothing.
