WASHINGTON – Prison officials from several states, including Texas, urged the Senate on Wednesday to let them jam cellphones, the hottest form of contraband behind bars.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is leading the push for legislation that would let prisons set up electronic jammers, warning of a rash of inmates arranging drug deals and intimidating witnesses "from the comfort of their prison cell."

Advocates of jamming couched it as a way to keep up technologically with the latest trends in inmate mischief – a stopgap when X-rays and cavity searches fail.

But cellular industry officials warned that jamming could affect legitimate customers and interfere with emergency communications.

"When a person is incarcerated ... the public should feel safe from that particular criminal," Hutchison said at a 90-minute hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. "That's the way it used to be before the sophisticated criminal and this sophisticated technology intervened."

Texas state Sen. John Whitmire of Houston recounted a two-week running conversation initiated last fall by a death row inmate, Richard Tabler, who had paid $2,100 to get a phone smuggled to the Polunsky Unit, sharing it with other killers, including members of violent prison gangs.

Whitmire, chairman of the Texas Senate's criminal justice committee, contacted the prison system's inspector general, John Moriarty. The inmate's mother and sister were arrested, prompting death threats from Tabler against Whitmire and his family – this time in writing, since by then the phone had been confiscated.

"It's a war," Whitmire said. "We have used pat-downs, dogs, metal detectors. ... We need this technology."

California confiscated more than 2,800 cellphones last year, double what it found the year before. The tally in Mississippi was nearly 2,000 and in federal prisons, more than 1,600.

Moriarty said Texas has budgeted $500,000 for four inspectors to ferret out cell signals at its 112 units. But the equipment is tricky, he said, and with a prison population of 156,000, it's not enough.

"This is an ongoing battle for corrections departments all across the country," he testified.

Current federal law prohibits the electronic disruption of phone calls.

The bill authored by Hutchison and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., would order the Federal Communications Commission to set rules that let prisons set up jammers.

But wireless industry representatives warned of unintended consequences.

When jamming has been tried at prisons in India and South America, "there are stories about up to 200,000 legitimate customers whose service was disrupted. And that's the kind of thing we don't want to see happen in this country," said Steve Largent, president and chief executive of the wireless industry trade group CTIA-The Wireless Association.

Instead, he argued, states should toughen penalties for contraband in prison, tighten security, and invest in detection technology. He also argued that eavesdropping on inmates might yield more long-term benefits.