PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. -- Her name is Razor and she has a nose for Nokias.

Razor, a 14-month-old Belgium Malinois, is the first cell phone detection dog to work in Florida prisons. On Tuesday, she took a break from her eight-week training to demonstrate her skills at the Broward Correctional Institution in Pembroke Pines.

At her coming-out party on Tuesday in a prison parking lot, Razor sniffed one wooden box, lunged at and jumped over a second, then smelled a third and promptly sat down next to it. It contained three cell phones, earning a scratch behind the ears and playtime with a tennis ball.

Department of Corrections officials said they're counting on Razor to help sniff out contraband cell phones in Florida prisons.

When she officially joins the corrections department in November, she'll help enforce a law that went into effect Oct. 1 that makes having a cell phone in prison illegal.

Get caught with a phone, and an inmate faces up to five additional years in prison and a fine of $5,000. The law also bans pagers, PDAs and handheld radios, but officials say the biggest problem is cell phones, which inmates have used to coordinate escape attempts, harass victims and arrange drug deals inside and outside of prison.

Corrections officials said cell phones are being smuggled in at alarming rates, posing a safety hazard. Between June 2007 and July 2008, 336 cell phones were smuggled into Florida’s prisons.

To fight the problem, officials have tried jamming cell phone signals but that can create problems for users of legitimate cell phones in the area. Drug sweeps have also turned up phones because both are often hidden in crafty places, like the soles of shower shoes, in tape players, in soda cans and inside the layers of rolls of toilet paper. That's where Razor comes in.

"We're hoping to find ones that we otherwise wouldn't find," said Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger, who said Razor's $6,500 cost was paid for by the Animal Welfare Foundation of Winter Garden.

"Our inmates are very, very creative in where they hide their contraband. They hide it up high. They hide it in light fixtures, in ceilings, in pipe chases," said Kevin Dean, who oversees the Department of Corrections' K-9 units.

Razor's name is a riff on the name of the popular Motorola cell phone, the RAZR, but she isn't the only state with a cell-phone dog detective. Virginia uses cell-phone sniffing dogs, and Maryland began using cell-phone sniffing dogs this summer. Maryland's three dogs have since found 23 cell phones, said Maryland prison spokesman Mark Vernarelli. But the dogs also have a deterrent effect.

"Whenever we bring a dog onto a tier we hear toilets flushing, we hear inmates calling out 'cell phone dog on the tier,"' Vernarelli said, adding inmates sometimes throw phones out of their cells rather than be caught with them.

Because of the dogs' success, later this month Maryland will hold a three-day workshop for other states to demonstrate how they train their dogs, Vernarelli said.

Razor, meanwhile, still has another six weeks left of an eight-week training. During that time her trainers will hide cell phones in ever more difficult places.

But her practice run in the parking lot of the Broward Correctional Institution, a facility that holds approximately 750 women, was a success. Corrections officials say she'll be ready soon, all those hidden cell phones are calling.

Razor will be fully trained by mid-November and assigned to South Florida. Corrections officials said they hope to have more like her in the future.