Not real sure what's "sophisticated" about it. You don't get towns that are much smaller than mine-fewer than 2,000 people in the entire county (city limits only has 500). You can literally buy these phones in any Dollar General store in my town. You walk in, hand over the money, and get your phone and the phone card. My son did it himself when he was 10. It's not any different than buying anything else in the store. There are no contracts involved.
I am not sold on this idea one way or the other. I don't have strong feelings about what happened in this case at all. I can't help but think that the main resistance to this idea is because it somehow implies something bad about Jayme. It doesn't. As I said in my other post, nobody outside of my immediate family knows that our son has his own phone. (Well, you all do now, of course.) It's a backup safety measure and I know other people who have provided them for THEIR children as well.
And Barron has them at their dollar store. Used to be quite the hot seller, probably still are. Children in rural communities/small towns are no less sophisticated when it comes to telephones or electronics. I have a preteen relative that just informed me knows how to hack a computer, the child is from a small town. We are not talking about living in the boonies with no services or in a remote cabin in the Yukon. There is wireless internet, there is great cell reception, etc. Barron is less than ten miles from Rice Lake where while not huge, there is a Menard's, a SuperWalmart, a Kohl's, Applebee's, Arby's, Taco John's, Hardee's, McDonald's, Burger King, Holly Hobby, Shopko, a small mall, two dollar stores, Jimmy John's, Pizza Hut, Papa Murphy's, Kentucky Fried, Walgreen's, Office Max, Goodwill, a ReStore, Subway and I could go on and on. The reason I point this out and state so many of them is I am trying to portray that although on a map you see no large towns and it all looks so rural, Rice Lake, for instance, has quite a bit for the well under 8,000 and some size of its population. Kids are just as savvy as anywhere else and have fairly easy access to the same things. In fact, the phone and internet use, etc. may even be higher since they are in a small town with nothing much to do (Barron itself) and long winters.
They may be more rural and live in a safer area than a big metropolis but when it comes to the ways of pre-teens or teenagers they are no different than anyone else's kids, especially with electronics.
I am not one that favors this theory. However, as I have said before that electronic sniffing dogs were used and they were looking for something or had some reason to bring in what is probably not a commonly used resource and they seemed to think a perp may come back for something he did not have time to take.
People that talk about such a phone are not blaming Jayme for anything. It is in my opinion pretty naive to not consider such a thing and various scenarios when it comes to predators.
