Cellebrite solutions give jails, prisons and correctional facilities the ability to turn every seized phone or drone into actionable evidence.
THE PROBLEM
Contraband phones enable inmates to coordinate violence, extortion, trafficking and additional criminal activity inside secure facilities. Cellebrite helps teams turn device data into defensible intelligence that exposes threats sooner, reduces risk and accelerates investigative outcomes while reinforcing public trust.
The threat goes beyond phones. Drones are now a primary delivery method for contraband at jails and prisons — dropping drugs, weapons and devices over facility walls faster than staff can respond. Cellebrite’s corrections solutions address both threats, giving agencies the forensic capability to act on recovered phones and UAVs before evidence disappears.
Identify violent threats, extortion schemes, gang coordination, trafficking attempts and staff-targeted risks early so leaders and investigators can intervene before danger escalates.
Centralize all device evidence, connect identifier’s messages and media across cases and facilities to eliminate investigative blind spots and improve operational visibility.
Share intelligence securely with prosecutors, task forces and law enforcement through a defensible auditable workflow without risk of evidence loss, delays or compromised chain of custody.
Strengthen public accountability, improve safety metrics and demonstrate responsible budgeting with easy to operate technology that delivers clear, measurable outcomes.
Reduce violence and illicit communications and gain clearer visibility into inmate behavior with minimal operational disruption.
Reveal a network’s coded communications, gang identifiers and cross-facility collaboration while quickly analyzing messages, media and activity patterns tied to organized behavior.
Use device-based insights to direct searches, identify contraband trends and support incident reviews and disciplinary actions.
Review clear summaries that highlight violations, communication patterns, prohibited contacts and key risk indicators to support timely and defensible decisions.
Deploy securely within air-gapped or restricted environments. Manage users’ access storage and audit logs with confidence in system stability and compliance.
You’re accountable for the safety of your facilities, your staff and the communities you serve — and contraband devices are undermining all three. Cellebrite gives you the intelligence infrastructure to disrupt criminal coordination inside your facilities, demonstrate measurable security outcomes to your Minister, and comply with national and state privacy legislation. Trusted by corrections agencies across Five Eyes member jurisdictions and across APAC.
Hundreds of calls pass through your facility every week, most reviewed manually, many never fully analysed. Cellebrite Genesis applies agentic AI to recorded prison calls, automatically decoding coded language, mapping co-conspirator networks, and generating intelligence briefs in minutes. Combine that with Inseyets device extraction and Pathfinder network analysis, and you have the complete intelligence picture: who is coordinating what, from inside your facility to criminal networks operating beyond the walls.
Strengthen public accountability, improve safety metrics and demonstrate responsible budgeting with easy to operate technology that delivers clear, measurable outcomes.
Reduce violence and illicit communications and gain clearer visibility into inmate behavior with minimal operational disruption.
Reveal a network’s coded communications, gang identifiers and cross-facility collaboration while quickly analyzing messages, media and activity patterns tied to organized behavior.
Use device-based insights to direct searches, identify contraband trends and support incident reviews and disciplinary actions.
Review clear summaries that highlight violations, communication patterns, prohibited contacts and key risk indicators to support timely and defensible decisions.
Deploy securely within air-gapped or restricted environments. Manage users’ access storage and audit logs with confidence in system stability and compliance.
You’re accountable for the safety of your facilities, your staff and the communities you serve — and contraband devices are undermining all three. Cellebrite gives you the intelligence infrastructure to disrupt criminal coordination inside your facilities, demonstrate measurable security outcomes to your Minister, and comply with national and state privacy legislation. Trusted by corrections agencies across Five Eyes member jurisdictions and across APAC.
Hundreds of calls pass through your facility every week, most reviewed manually, many never fully analysed. Cellebrite Genesis applies agentic AI to recorded prison calls, automatically decoding coded language, mapping co-conspirator networks, and generating intelligence briefs in minutes. Combine that with Inseyets device extraction and Pathfinder network analysis, and you have the complete intelligence picture: who is coordinating what, from inside your facility to criminal networks operating beyond the walls.
Correctional agencies typically move from ad hoc device handling to a centralized, defensible workflow covering the full contraband threat — phones, drones and beyond. These solutions work together to deliver fast extraction and UAV forensics, AI-powered analytics and secure browser-based sharing with prosecutors and partner agencies. The result is modernized investigative operations, stronger accountability and faster threat detection without adding burden to staff.
Extracts Full File System data from confiscated inmate phones — including encrypted, deleted and hidden content — across the broadest range of iOS and Android devices. Purpose-built for correctional environments including air-gapped and restricted deployments.
Learn More about InseyetsCloud-based evidence management with tamper-evident chain of custody from device intake to prosecution. Enables secure, browser-based sharing with prosecutors and partner agencies — eliminating USBs, DVDs and manual handoffs. Reduces evidence review time by up to 60% through AI-assisted tagging.
Learn More about GuardianAI-powered analytics that maps gang structures, inmate-to-outside-accomplice networks and contraband distribution patterns across multiple devices simultaneously. Surfaces coded language, high-risk contacts and cross-facility connections investigators would otherwise miss.
Learn More about PathfinderThe Cellebrite CFID (Covert Forensic Imaging Device) is a standalone field collection tool purpose-built for on-site UAV processing, SIM card extraction and mobile device collection. Battery-powered and small enough to fit in a pocket, CFID enables corrections officers to act the moment a drone or device is recovered — without waiting on a lab. Data collected with CFID flows directly into Inseyets, Guardian and Pathfinder for analysis.
Learn More about CFID
Smuggled phones and drone-dropped devices let incarcerated individuals keep running drug operations, fraud schemes and acts of violence from inside their cells. Across a patchwork of federal, state, provincial and county facilities, every device left unexamined is an operation still in business.
A single operation can run through a county jail, a state prison and a federal yard at once. Move intelligence as fast as the network does and you dismantle the whole thing, not just the piece inside your walls.
In one of the world’s most litigious legal systems, intelligence that cannot survive a suppression motion puts the offender right back in business. Defensible, CJIS-aligned handling is what turns a seized device into a conviction that sticks.
Drones drop phones into the yard and thin staffing leaves fewer eyes on more devices. The faster you act on a seized phone, the sooner you protect your staff, your inmates and the public beyond the fence.
Reclaiming control inside the walls is how you reduce the violence outside them.
Helping Prisons and Correctional Facilities Across EMEA Turn Confiscated Devices Into Actionable Intelligence
The Challenge
Contraband phones, smuggled devices, and recovered drones are escalating security threats in EMEA prisons. These items aren’t just contraband—they are tools for coordinating organized crime, intimidating witnesses, and orchestrating violence from behind bars. The intelligence they hold is the key to dismantling illicit networks both inside and outside your facility.
The Solution
Why EMEA Corrections Intelligence Requires a Specialized Approach
Across Asia-Pacific, contraband phones coordinate drug trafficking and monitored calls reveal criminal operations conducted in coded language. Cellebrite gives corrections teams the tools to extract device intelligence, analyse every communication automatically, map criminal networks and share evidence with law enforcement.
Inseyets delivers forensic-depth extraction from any seized device — with an audit-ready chain of custody built for Australia’s Privacy Act, Japan’s APPI and India’s DPDP Act. Trusted by Five Eyes agencies.
Map networks beyond the walls
Pathfinder connects device data to criminal associates on the outside — bridging corrections intelligence to active law enforcement investigations in the field.
Cellebrite Genesis applies agentic AI to recorded prison calls — automatically decoding coded language, mapping co-conspirator networks, and generating intelligence briefs. What takes investigators weeks to surface manually, Genesis delivers in minutes.
Share intelligence compliantly
Guardian enables documented evidence sharing between corrections teams and law enforcement — from facility to courtroom, compliant with APAC data protection requirements.
Gang and cartel leaders use contraband phones to direct trafficking, extortion and violence far beyond the walls. In overcrowded facilities where organized groups compete for control, the prison becomes an asset to the network instead of a check on it.
Incarcerated leaders give orders in real time. Extract and decode device data fast enough and you disrupt the next shipment, the next threat or the next act of violence before it happens, not after.
Ransom demands and threats originate from inside facilities while families and businesses keep paying. Map who is connected to whom and a single handset becomes the blueprint for dismantling an entire network and cutting its revenue.
Evidence has to put leaders in front of a court and respect data protection law such as Brazil’s LGPD. Get it right and you hold the people running these operations accountable, on your own terms and under your own control.
Left alone, a contraband phone is a criminal enterprise still in business. Acted on fast, it is how you stop the harm before it reaches the street.
Smuggled phones and drone-dropped devices let incarcerated individuals keep running drug operations, fraud schemes and acts of violence from inside their cells. Across a patchwork of federal, state, provincial and county facilities, every device left unexamined is an operation still in business.
A single operation can run through a county jail, a state prison and a federal yard at once. Move intelligence as fast as the network does and you dismantle the whole thing, not just the piece inside your walls.
In one of the world’s most litigious legal systems, intelligence that cannot survive a suppression motion puts the offender right back in business. Defensible, CJIS-aligned handling is what turns a seized device into a conviction that sticks.
Drones drop phones into the yard and thin staffing leaves fewer eyes on more devices. The faster you act on a seized phone, the sooner you protect your staff, your inmates and the public beyond the fence.
Reclaiming control inside the walls is how you reduce the violence outside them.
Helping Prisons and Correctional Facilities Across EMEA Turn Confiscated Devices Into Actionable Intelligence
The Challenge
Contraband phones, smuggled devices, and recovered drones are escalating security threats in EMEA prisons. These items aren’t just contraband—they are tools for coordinating organized crime, intimidating witnesses, and orchestrating violence from behind bars. The intelligence they hold is the key to dismantling illicit networks both inside and outside your facility.
The Solution
Why EMEA Corrections Intelligence Requires a Specialized Approach
Across Asia-Pacific, contraband phones coordinate drug trafficking and monitored calls reveal criminal operations conducted in coded language. Cellebrite gives corrections teams the tools to extract device intelligence, analyse every communication automatically, map criminal networks and share evidence with law enforcement.
Inseyets delivers forensic-depth extraction from any seized device — with an audit-ready chain of custody built for Australia’s Privacy Act, Japan’s APPI and India’s DPDP Act. Trusted by Five Eyes agencies.
Map networks beyond the walls
Pathfinder connects device data to criminal associates on the outside — bridging corrections intelligence to active law enforcement investigations in the field.
Cellebrite Genesis applies agentic AI to recorded prison calls — automatically decoding coded language, mapping co-conspirator networks, and generating intelligence briefs. What takes investigators weeks to surface manually, Genesis delivers in minutes.
Share intelligence compliantly
Guardian enables documented evidence sharing between corrections teams and law enforcement — from facility to courtroom, compliant with APAC data protection requirements.
Gang and cartel leaders use contraband phones to direct trafficking, extortion and violence far beyond the walls. In overcrowded facilities where organized groups compete for control, the prison becomes an asset to the network instead of a check on it.
Incarcerated leaders give orders in real time. Extract and decode device data fast enough and you disrupt the next shipment, the next threat or the next act of violence before it happens, not after.
Ransom demands and threats originate from inside facilities while families and businesses keep paying. Map who is connected to whom and a single handset becomes the blueprint for dismantling an entire network and cutting its revenue.
Evidence has to put leaders in front of a court and respect data protection law such as Brazil’s LGPD. Get it right and you hold the people running these operations accountable, on your own terms and under your own control.
Left alone, a contraband phone is a criminal enterprise still in business. Acted on fast, it is how you stop the harm before it reaches the street.
Digital intelligence for corrections refers to the process of lawfully extracting, analyzing and managing data from confiscated inmate devices — phones, tablets and drones — to generate actionable investigative intelligence. Cellebrite’s corrections platform unifies extraction (Inseyets), analytics (Pathfinder) and evidence management (Guardian) into a single defensible workflow used by jails, prisons and correctional agencies worldwide.
When a contraband phone is recovered, corrections investigators use digital forensics solutions to extract all accessible data — including deleted messages, encrypted content, contacts and media. This data is then analyzed to map inmate networks, identify criminal coordination patterns and build cases for prosecution. Cellebrite Inseyets performs the extraction; Pathfinder surfaces hidden connections across devices; Guardian manages evidence and enables secure sharing with prosecutors.
Yes. Cellebrite CFID (Covert Forensic Imaging Device) is purpose-built for UAV data extraction in exactly this scenario — it is battery-powered, portable and designed for field use, enabling corrections officers to process a recovered drone on-site without waiting on an external lab. CFID extracts GPS flight logs, operator device identifiers and paired controller account information from recovered UAVs. The data then flows into Cellebrite Inseyets for analysis and Pathfinder for network mapping. This is critical in jail environments where drones often disappear quickly and the window to act is narrow.
Chain-of-custody in digital evidence management is the documented, unbroken record of who accessed, handled or transferred evidence from the moment of seizure through prosecution. In corrections, maintaining chain-of-custody is critical for evidence admissibility. Cellebrite Guardian creates an automatic, tamper-evident audit trail for every piece of digital evidence — from device intake through sharing with prosecutors — ensuring defensible evidence handling at every stage.
Cellebrite Pathfinder enables gang investigators and STG officers to map inmate networks by analyzing communication patterns, shared contacts and coded language across multiple devices simultaneously. Investigators can visualize relationships between inmates, outside associates and criminal organizations — identifying leadership structures, distribution networks and cross-facility coordination without manually reviewing each device
Yes. Cellebrite Inseyets supports offline and air-gapped deployment configurations designed for correctional environments with restricted network access. Jail IT teams can manage user permissions, storage and audit logs within a controlled environment that meets institutional compliance and security requirements.
Talk to a Cellebrite specialist about your facility’s specific needs — phones, drones or both.
Best Practices for Investigating Contraband Phones and Drones in Jails
