Prison phone smuggling penalty doubles to two years.
S. 736 — Lieutenant Osvaldo Albarati Stopping Prison Contraband Act · Filed by Chuck Grassley (R-IA) · 17 cosponsors · Introduced Feb 26, 2025 · Passed chamber
Your members of Congress
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What it does
The bill makes smuggling a phone into prison a crime. The penalty rises from one year to two years. It tells the Bureau of Prisons to review contraband rules within one year. The review must protect inmates and staff.
Who it affects
Prison staff and inmates face stricter rules. People caught smuggling phones into prisons face longer sentences.
One thing to notice
The bill requires a policy review. It does not say what happens if the review is not finished.
From the analysis of the bill text, linked under Primary records below.
Where it stands
17 cosponsors: 9 Democrats, 8 Republicans.
- Feb 26, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Feb 26, 2025 — Referred to Senate Committee on the Judiciary · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary”
- May 14, 2026 — Reported out of committee · Congress.gov: “Committee on the Judiciary. Ordered to be reported without amendment favorably”
- Jun 10, 2026 — Passed the Senate · Congress.gov: “Passed Senate without amendment by Voice Vote. (consideration: CR S2723, S2726; text: CR S2726)”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
4 groups reported lobbying about this bill. They filed 5 reports from Dec 2025 to Jun 2026.
Those reports show $4,520,426 in lobbying spending. Each report lists about 24 bills. So that money was not all for this bill.
More groups named this bill than 72% of bills with any report.
Chuck Grassley, who sponsored the bill, received $49,167 from PACs for the 2026 election.
- Ctia-the Wireless Association — $3,640,000 in 1 report
- American Fed of Government Employees AFL-CIO — $840,426 in 2 reports
- Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association — $40,000 in 1 report
- Afge Local 4070 — $0 in 1 report
Lobbying is legal. These reports show who lobbied about this bill, not what changed.
Words to know
- contraband — Items that are not allowed in a prison.
- Bureau of Prisons — The government agency that runs federal prisons.
- penalty — A punishment for breaking a law, such as prison time.
- lobbying — Trying to influence lawmakers about a bill. Companies and groups pay people to do this.
- PACs — Groups that collect money and give it to candidates for office.
- sponsored — To sponsor a bill is to introduce it in Congress and put your name on it.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (1,138 characters) on Jul 10, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 14,522 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-09-21.
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