National Gang Unit chief: contraband cellphones are a 'game changer'; Victorville visit produced First Step Act sentence credits

Amy Kelly, chief of the National Gang Unit, told the Bureau of Prisons’ Transparency Talks podcast that contraband cellphones have become a "game changer" that allows incarcerated gang leaders to run criminal organizations from inside facilities and coordinate with cartel and street networks outside.

"Cell phones [are a] game changer," Kelly said, explaining that phones enable transactions and communications that evade the Bureau’s oversight and allow pipelines for narcotics and other criminal activity to run from prison to prison and to the streets.

The National Gang Unit, Kelly said, was formed out of earlier intelligence work and provides national oversight for gang-related intelligence collected by field Special Investigative Services (SIS) offices. "We take that intelligence out of the SIS shops. We look at it on a national level and we try to provide that to decision makers," she said, describing the unit’s role in both analysis and partner coordination.

Kelly gave several figures to describe scope: the unit tracks "over 80 gangs," and the BOP holds "over 20,000 gang members" among "about 155,000" people in federal custody. She said gang members are present across custody levels — from penitentiaries to medium and low institutions — and that the NGU and SIS work daily to monitor and disrupt those networks.

Kelly described the gang dissociation program, which she said "provides an opportunity" for eligible incarcerated individuals to leave gang life. Participation requires meeting criteria and contributing intelligence; outside law enforcement and U.S. attorneys often participate in debriefs. "Once they're able to drop out of their gang through that program, we'll put them in a safe location where they can actually program gang free," she said.

The podcast also detailed a multi-day visit to USP Victorville, where Kelly and BOP leadership said they met influential inmates, walked compounds with frontline staff and took visible, on-site action (repairs and leadership engagement) intended to lower tensions. The moderator said inmates who were later transferred from Victorville reported that "it wasn't one of those ... audits" but rather visible change "on the ground." Kelly said the presence of staff at every level and immediate fixes brought credibility.

The episode included a discussion of sentence reductions tied to the First Step Act. The moderator stated that, before Victorville, the BOP "has never ... approved one reduction sentence" under the First Step Act; he said that at Victorville one person was released the same day and others received credit reductions. Kelly called the Victorville example "a powerful example" that changed inmate motivation. Both hosts and Kelly presented the Victorville approvals as an unusually visible use of the First Step Act at that site.

On communications policy, the moderator said the BOP has increased minute limits on monitored phone systems and said the agency hopes to roll out tablets "this year" to expand monitored and trackable communications as an alternative to personal cellphones.

Kelly emphasized staff safety and the need to both remove high-risk individuals and create programming that reduces risk for staff and other incarcerated people. "We surgically will take those individuals out of there that want to continue introducing contraband," she said, describing coordinated removals and institutional moves aimed at lowering what she called the "temperature" in penitentiaries where extreme violence occurs.

Kelly and the moderator described several long-serving gang members who formally disengaged through the program, and she said those departures offered hope that change is possible even for people who had been affiliated for decades.

The podcast closed with praise for the NGU’s work and acknowledgment of the challenge of adapting policy and operations to reduce contraband and gang-driven violence while protecting staff and maintaining programming options.

The statements and program details in this article come from the Transparency Talks episode (remarks by Amy Kelly and the program’s moderator). Claims about the BOP’s use of the First Step Act and exact counts (for example, "over 20,000 gang members" and "about 155,000" total inmates) reflect on-record statements by participants in the episode and are reported here as described by those speakers.