The South Carolina Department of Corrections is redoubling efforts to stop inmates from using cell phones. Officials with the department say phones smuggled into America’s prisons are being used to organize criminal activity and order attacks on witnesses and law enforcement.

“We can not trace them. We can not record them,” said SCDC Capt. Robert Johnson. “And that enables the inmate to continue his activities to harass the public.”

Capt. Johnson, who was in charge of keeping contraband out of South Carolina’s prisons, was shot six times back in March after an intruder kicked in the door to his home as he was getting ready for work. According to investigators, the attack was orchestrated by a prison inmate using a smuggled cell phone.

“My wife said there was a tussle,” Johnson said. “I don’t remember that. All I know is I met him there in the hallway. I don’t remember the shots. I do know I got shot six times.”

South Carolina corrections officers conduct routine spot checks. Over the past year, they’ve confiscated well over 2 thousand phones and accessories.

But prison officials said the small size of the devices makes it easy to smuggle them inside. Criminal entrepreneurs have tossed footballs stuffed with cell phones over prison fences. They’ve shot them over walls using potato guns and even attempted deliveries with toy helicopters.

SCDC officials have spent several years pressing Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to change a 1934 law that prevents state and local agencies from jamming public airwaves. But the idea faces opposition from the cell phone industry, which claims jamming technology might interfere with legitimate communications in the area.

“While a solution needs to be found that addresses the problem, we can’t have the solution cause problems for law abiding citizens or for public safety uses of wireless,” said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president for regulatory affairs with CTIA-The Wireless Association.

SCDC Director Jon Ozmint said jamming technology, already in use by the federal government and military, has become so precise, it can limit service disruption to specific buildings or rooms, while having no effect on communications outside the targeted areas. Ozmint said he’s frustrated that federal regulators have not authorized his department to use the technology, other than a one-time test back in 2008, two years before Capt. Johnson was shot.

“That’s what made it so difficult to go talk to Capt. Johnson’s wife that morning as he lay there on the operating table with six bullets in him,” Ozmint said. “If the FCC had just done its job, he wouldn’t have been shot.”