Drones are one of the fastest-growing ways contraband, including phones, reaches people in custody. Every recovered device holds leads on who is behind it. Cellebrite solutions helps you find those leads.
Agencies around the world rely on Cellebrite technology to make digital evidence more accessible, actionable and defensible.
Investigations supported worldwide annually
Public organizations trust Cellebrite
Years leading digital forensics
Countries rely on Cellebrite technology
THE PROBLEM
Contraband phones give inmates a direct line to someone outside, to coordinate violence, extortion, trafficking and other crime inside secure facilities. Cellebrite helps teams turn recovered device data into defensible intelligence that protects staff, exposes threats sooner, reduces risk and accelerates investigative outcomes while reinforcing public trust.
The threat goes beyond phones. Drones are now one of the fastest-growing ways phones, drugs and weapons get over facility walls, and they can arrive faster than staff can respond.
Once a phone or drone is recovered, correctional teams need to read it quickly, before the leads go cold or the data is lost. Cellebrite’s solutions address both threats, giving facilities the forensic capability to act on recovered phones and drones 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.
Bring device evidence from cases and facilities into one place and connect identifier’s messages and media to reduce investigative blind spots and improve operational visibility.
Share evidence securely with prosecutors, task forces and law enforcement through a defensible, auditable workflow that cuts delays and reduces the risk of evidence loss, or compromised chain of custody.
Drones have become a critical tool for smuggling contraband into correctional facilities, delivering phones, drugs and weapons with increasing speed and precision. Every recovered drone contains valuable intelligence, revealing where it launched, where it traveled and what occurred during flight. But that evidence can lose value while a drone sits in a lab awaiting examination.
Inseyets CFID helps officers act immediately. This handheld, battery-powered forensic solution enables on-site collection of drone data without a lab or network connection. Officers can quickly extract flight logs, GPS launch locations, flight routes, images, and videos at the moment of recovery.
CFID also supports collection from accessible phones, SIM cards and other portable media, helping officers gather evidence across a wide range of contraband-related incidents. Data can then be imported into Cellebrite Physical Analyzer for deeper analysis and investigative follow-up.
Show your community you are acting on contraband in your jail, with tools your team can use without a forensic specialist and results you can document.
Contraband is getting in faster than staff can stop it, and you answer for what comes next. Give your investigators the data to see who is coordinating from inside and outside, so you can step in earlier and show concrete action after an incident occurs.
Spot coded language, gang identifiers and cross-facility links in recovered phone’s messages and media, without reviewing every device by hand or manually.
Hundreds of calls pass through your facility every week, most reviewed manually, many never fully analyzed. 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.
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.
Show your community you are acting on contraband in your jail, with tools your team can use without a forensic specialist and results you can document.
Contraband is getting in faster than staff can stop it, and you answer for what comes next. Give your investigators the data to see who is coordinating from inside and outside, so you can step in earlier and show concrete action after an incident occurs.
Spot coded language, gang identifiers and cross-facility links in recovered phone’s messages and media, without reviewing every device by hand or manually.
Hundreds of calls pass through your facility every week, most reviewed manually, many never fully analyzed. 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.
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.
