CUMBERLAND — Contraband cell phones in prisons throughout the country may end up being legally jammed based upon a test going on this week at Federal Correctional Institution-Cumberland and the reaction of the U.S. Congress.

Gov. Martin O’Malley traveled to Allegany County on Wednesday to be on hand while the National Telecommunications and Information Administration jammed cell phones at the federal facility and also ran tests to see if off-premise phones were being affected as well.

“I can tell you this,” O’Malley said. “As I rode around in the NTIA van off of the prison grounds, I was able to use my cell phone to call my wife and also to send a text message to Senator (Barbara) Mikulski.”

O’Malley contacted Mikulski because she had co-sponsored Senate Bill 251, the Safe Prisons Communication Act, which passed the Senate unanimously and is awaiting action in Congress.

The Federal Communications Commission granted a two-week waiver to allow the jamming tests at Cumberland.

“Once this bill becomes law you are going to see states lining up to have the federal government jam cell phones in prisons,” O’Malley said.

The full results of the testing will not be known for two months.

O’Malley and Gary Maynard, Maryland’s secretary of public safety and correctional services, said that although it is illegal for inmates to have cell phones, the communication devices are there nonetheless and must be jammed to prevent incarcerated criminals from organizing extortion, drug deals and murders.

“We have to separate the crime leaders in jail from their street soldiers,” O’Malley said.

Maynard said the riots that broke out simultaneously at four disparate prisons in Oklahoma had been organized via cell phones.

FCI-Cumberland Warden Jim Whitehead said jamming would have no impact on prison operations because even employees are not permitted to have cell phones at the facility. Radios are used for internal communications.

O’Malley said land lines would still allow a prison officer to be notified should a personal emergency arise at home.

O’Malley said the state uses all legal efforts, including phone-sniffing dogs and body-orifice scanning equipment, to keep cell phones out of state prisons.

“We can never get them all,” O’Malley said, adding that in 2007 there were 741 cell phones confiscated from the state’s 24 prisons, then 1,236 in 2008 and 1,658 in 2009.

“We even know of cell phones being rocketed from air bazookas over walls and into prison yards in some states. But if we can jam the phones it doesn’t matter if they get in or not,” he said.

FCI-Cumberland was used as the test site at Mikulski’s urging. It is Maryland’s only federal prison.

“The enormous hurdles required simply to make this test possible should serve as evidence enough of the critical need for passage of S. 251, the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009. We must give law enforcement quick access to every technological tool available — including cell phone jamming ­— to combat illegal cell phone use on the inside and protect our neighbors and families on the outside,” Mikulski said in a prepared statement.

O’Malley said cell phone jamming will make the lives of corrections officers safer, eliminating the need to search cells for the devices.

“One cell phone in a prison is one too many,” the governor said.

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.