Shropshire prisoner gets time added to sentence for having mobile phone to contact his sister
The 20-year-old has family in Manchester.
A prisoner who acquired a mobile phone in jail in an attempt to contact his sister has had time added onto his sentence.
Prison officers searched Dylan Jewell’s single-occupant cell at HMP Stoke Heath near Market Drayton on two occasions a week apart earlier this year and found a Zanco phone and then a charger for it, a court heard.
Zanco bills its phones as the world’s smallest functioning mobiles, selling handsets that are less than two inches tall.
Jewell, 20, attended a hearing at Telford Magistrates Court on Tuesday (May 19) by video link from the prison and admitted two counts of having a banned item in prison, on January 28 and February 5.
Jewell is serving a sentence imposed in March last year and was due to be released in October this year. He told the court he had been trying to contact family in Manchester.
“I was asking for emergency credit and I wasn’t getting it,” he told the court. He said he had been attempting to contact his younger sister who had undergone a health procedure, but prison staff “weren’t doing anything about it”.
District Judge Joseph O’Connor told Jewell: “Unfortunately when you’re in prison there are going to be unfortunate things going on outside.
“Prisons do have rules and they need people inside the prison to follow those rules. There needs to be, as has happened, a punishment for these offences.”
He accepted that Jewell had not been attempting to “trick or undermine the court system”.
He imposed a sentence of 12 weeks for both offences, added to Jewell’s current sentence.