Cell phones smell. You wouldn’t think so, but they do. The K-9 Unit of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, while training seven recently acquired cell-phone-sniffing dogs, first put a whole bunch of cell-phone parts in a plastic box to create a kind of sachet of cell-phone scent for use in imprinting. The basic, pervasive cell-phone smell that built up in the closed box was powerful—a sweetish, metallic, ozoney, weird robotic reek. People would never carry such a rank object as a cell phone in their pockets if their noses were as good as a dog’s.

To Troy, Ernie, Chance, and the other muscular, well-fed, and extremely enthusiastic dogs who search for illegal cell phones inside New Jersey’s thirteen state prisons, the smell of a cell phone is bliss. They love to follow it, love finding its source even more. While held in restraint, just before the search, they emit low, well-disciplined whines of almost unbearable expectation. And when they do find the cell phone—or the cell-phone charger, the earpiece, the battery, or any other related object that somehow picked up cell-phone scent (recently a cell-phone-sniffing dog, though not trained to search for narcotics, found some narcotics that had evidently been stored next to a cell phone)—the dogs react with a panting, whining, scratching happiness greater than any human happiness by a factor similar to that by which a dog’s sense of smell is said to be better than ours.

Inside a prison, cell phones defeat some of the purpose of incarceration. They’re among the biggest problems prison officials face. Criminals with cell phones continue to run their gangs even while locked up. How do they get the phones? “Oh, gee—all kinds of ways,” Thomas Moran, the New Jersey D.O.C. chief of staff, said the other day. “Their friends shoot ’em over the fence with potato guns, fly ’em in on model airplanes, arrows . . . Body cavities, of course, when a girlfriend visits. Packages. Food deliveries. F.C.C. regulations say we can’t interfere with cell-phone transmissions by jamming. Going after the illegal phones with dogs is by far the most efficient means.”

Recently, the officers of the K-9 Unit held a demonstration with their cell-phone dogs on the grounds of the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility, in central Jersey farm country. The officers are so proud of their dogs they beam. As the dogs found cell phones hidden in lockers and near bunks in an unused dorm building, and sniffed out a dog-tooth-marked cell phone in the weeds of a field, the officers explained the program.

Captain Matthew Kyle: “We don’t want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. It’s an organic substance that’s in all cell phones—leave it at that. The dogs can smell it even when it’s masked. They can find it if the cell phone’s in water, oil, peanut butter—anywhere.”

Sergeant William Crampton: “Only time we ever had a dog indicate inaccurately was on a diabetic test kit one individual had.”

Officer Donald Mitchell: “We worked with thirteen dogs to get the seven we have now. Some dogs we had to fail out for environmental reasons. The dog can’t work in the prison environment. Maybe a dog don’t like the slippery floors in the cellblock, or the noise, or the food odors. Some dogs don’t like heights. On the top tier of cells you’re looking down through a floor grating four or five stories. There’s dogs won’t walk on that. Or they don’t like the heat up there in the summer.”

Officer Joseph Nicholas: “All our dogs right now are German shepherds or Labs. We did try one golden retriever, but we had to fail him out. That dog was too easygoing. He’d come in a room on a search and just lay down. We sent him back to the Seeing Eye dog center in Morristown, where all our cell-phone dogs came from. That golden was a lover, not a fighter.”

Captain Kyle: “Very few other states have cell-phone-dog programs like ours—Maryland and Virginia are two of them. There’s a private contractor in California that trains dogs for cell-phone work, but they charge twenty-one thousand dollars for three dogs. We trained all our dogs ourselves, saving the taxpayers money. Since we started with our first three dogs, in October of 2008, we’ve found a hundred and thirty-three cell phones, a hundred and twenty-eight chargers, and I’m not sure how many earpieces, batteries, and other items. We believe that eventually every prison system in the country will be using cell-phone dogs.” ♦