Santa Ana’s Triple Crown Industries Tries to Get Salesmen Into Prisons : SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY

If Triple Crown Industries in Santa Ana has its way, its salesmen will be spending a lot of time in prison.

The start-up company specializes in telephone equipment and operator service for prisons, which have been the scene of a lot of telephone credit card fraud in recent years.

Triple Crown, which employs 20 people in Santa Ana and hopes to add 48 telephone operators in the near future, markets a heavy-duty, coinless phone for prisons.

The company, which competes with regional telephone companies such as Pacific Bell, installs and services the phones in prisons at no charge to the institution. The prison receives 15% of the gross revenues collected in the phones. Triple Crown gets the other 85%.

A heavily used phone can collect $2,000 per month, said Triple Crown President Kim Moore.

Triple Crown has installed its systems in 17 institutions in eight states, including the Los Angeles County Central Jail.

The county jail has installed 22 Triple Crown phones throughout its various facilities. There are about 1,200 phones throughout the county system, said Lt. Fred Price, assistant director of telecommunications for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“They’re an extremely durable phone,” Price said. “We’ve experienced virtually no failures with them in the last several months.

“We have a problem with malicious vandalism,” he said. “The more durable the phone, the better off everyone is. We cannot afford the luxury, nor should the inmates be confronted with, equipment that doesn’t work.”

Triple Crown currently must route its calls through telephone company operators. But the company plans to establish its own operator centers within the prison grounds using inmate labor.