It turns out two cell phones have made it to North Carolina's death row.

Correction officials say it first happened in April 2007, when Johnny Street Parker was found with a cell phone. Parker, 34, was convicted of first-degree murder in Sampson County in 1997, Dan Kane reports.

Department of Correction spokesman Keith Acree said Parker received 30 days in segregation for possessing the phone. He was put on increased supervision for more than a year for struggling with correction officers seeking to take away the cell phone.

Acree said the department suspects a correction officer brought in the phone. The officer, who was not identified, was questioned and resigned two days later. A second phone was found a short time later behind the cover of an electrical outlet on death row, and correction officials suspect the same officer had smuggled that phone in as well.

The department is taking several steps to curb the smuggling of cell phones. They have acquired a dog that can sniff the phones and have tightened up their security checks of visitors and inmates returning to prison from work release.

The department also plans to ask state lawmakers to make it a felony to smuggle cell phones into prisons, and it is looking into jamming technology that would knock out cell phone signals, but that would require clearance from the Federal Communications Commission.

So far this year, the department has confiscated roughly 140 cell phones and dismissed several staff for bringing roughly a dozen of those phones into prisons across the state.

The Department of Correction has denied Alan Gell's former girlfriend and their son permission to visit the former death row inmate in prison.

Gell is back in prison, serving a five-year sentence for taking indecent liberties with a minor. The minor in question is his former girlfriend, Olivia Harris of Ahoskie. She is the mother of Gell's child, 18-month-old Sean Michael Gell, Joe Neff reports.

During the year and a half that Gell spent awaiting trial in the Bertie-Martin Regional Jail, Harris and Sean made weekly visits to see Gell.

After Gell pleaded guilty and was moved to the state prison system, Harris and her son applied for visitation privileges. The Department of Correction turned them down.

More after the jump.

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The state Department of Correction has a new ethics policy.

Written by a leadership training team over the past ten months, the policy will help the state prison system meet the accreditation requirements for the American Correctional Association.

The policy is short but far-reaching, said spokesman Keith Acree:

It is the policy of the North Carolina Department of Correction that no person connected with the Department of Correction will use his or her official position to secure real or perceived special privileges or advantages.

The policy comes with a list of goals, such as "be committed to excellence" and "be accountable to the citizens of North Carolina," for each employee.

All 20,000 employees must sign a copy for their personnel files. There is no penalty for violations, although many of the "special privileges or advantages" would be against existing policy anyway, Acree said.

"It's designed to be a standard of performance and conduct that we want our employees to aspire to," he said.