Decatur County Correction Facility inmate Melvin Williams was arrested on Wednesday after officers found a quantity of marijuana and a cellphone in his possession.

“An officer was making rounds in the dormitory,” Warden Gordon Screen said. “He smelt some marijuana. So, he searched the area and that inmate was in the area. He found some marijuana on him and also found a cellphone. He actually found it on his person.”

Williams is serving a 15-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter and has been locked up since August of 2007. He has been an inmate at the Decatur County facility since September of 2016.

Screen said that guards are more frequently confiscating contraband before it enters the facility, but that some still gets passed.

“It is amazing the things that they will go through to try and get a cellphone in,” Screen said. “We have got them out of property, trash that they try to bring in from outside. Sometimes they are successful and a lot of times they are not.”

It has become increasingly more difficult for the inmates to successfully smuggle the items because the jail uses a cellsense device.

“It is a pole that sits on a base and it will detect any metal or communication device,” Screen said.

The drugs are harder to keep out though because the device does not detect them.

“The drugs, we know for a fact that they are getting in through ingesting or inserting them,” Screen said. “We don’t have a way of actually checking that unless we get an x-ray machine.”

Screen said that Williams was placed in solitary confinement while warrants were taken out for his arrest and that he will likely be transferred back to a state penitentiary.