Training dogs to find smuggled cell phones in prisons can help reduce inmates' criminal activities, which include threatening witnesses and warning fellow inmates about the movements of correctional officers.

We could all use one from time to time: a dog that can find the darn cell phone.

Maryland has three. Their job is to sniff out phones smuggled into prisons.

“Seek,” Sgt. David Brosky told his dog Alba this week, offering a public demonstration at the former Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.

Alba made her way through an unoccupied prison cell until she came upon a rolled-up pair of jeans on a bed. She sat, a signal she had found something.

“Good girrrrrrrrrrl,” said Brosky, a corrections officer, handing the dog a ball, a reward for finding the black cell phone tucked in the pants.

The state’s trained dogs – Tazz and Rudd, along with Alba – could be the solution to a problem facing prison administrators nationwide, a solution taking hold in the Washington region.

Smuggled cell phones allow inmates to run criminal enterprises, threaten witnesses and warn fellow inmates about the movements of correctional officers, state officials said.

“Cell phones are perhaps the worst type of contraband,” Gary D. Maynard, Maryland’s secretary of public safety and correctional services, said. “In most cases, they provide an easy, continuing connection back to the inmate’s life on the street.”

As cell phones have become smaller, they have become easier to hide. They are smuggled into prisons by inmates on work-release programs, visiting family members, contractors working in the facilities and corrections officers, state officials said. In some cases, phones have been tossed over fences to prisoners, officials said.

Inmates don’t just use the phones; they trade and sell them, sometimes for as much as $350.

The three Maryland dogs have been trained to smell cell phones using techniques employed to teach dogs to smell drugs. It isn’t clear which parts of phones the dogs detect, but the animals probably take in a combination of odors from various sections, said Maj. Peter Anderson, who heads up the state’s K-9 operations for prisons.

It’s harder for dogs to detect cell phones than marijuana, Anderson said. But it was clear that Alba and Tazz (Rudd didn’t participate) were up to the challenge.

The dogs were asked to find phones more than a half-dozen times and failed only once to find their target in 30 seconds. At one point, Alba, a Belgian malinois, passed small TVs and a VCR before stopping at a TV that had a cell phone inside.

In the past year, the Virginia prison system has had six dogs trained to detect cell phones. “It seems to work very well for us so far,” said Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections.