Last week, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy looked at the smart fridge in her kitchen and decided to try and talk to it: "I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my electronics again." Sure enough, it worked. The message Dorothy said out loud to her fridge was tweeted out by her Twitter account.
(And before that, she used her DS, her Wii, and a cousin's old iPod. There's always a friend's house, too.)
Confiscate the hell out of it. That's what parenting is for. How much money is a kid going to spend on burner phones before deciding to just stop bringing them to the house?
I don't really understand what you're arguing for here. Obviously prisons understand they can't catch everything, but they try anyway because it's still better than letting prisoners bring in whatever they want.
They try, and they fail comprehensively, and that's despite being very willing to do things that would be extremely clear child abuse if I tried them on my kids.
The prison warden doesn't care if the prisoners love him 20 years from now.
Kids don't need cellphones. We want them to have one often because of our own insecurities.