A passive optical element that is a simple, inexpensive, and effective way for producing laser speckle is described. The optical element, a random phase plate, was developed in our laboratory. The statistics of the speckle pattern it produces were measured and are discussed in this paper. The phase plate was used to produce a speckled beam using a 5-mW cw He-Ne laser with a Gaussian beam profile and using a pulsed Nd:YAG laser with a nonuniform intensity profile for which the mean intensity was 10(9) W/cm(2).