Drone Drops Drugs Onto Ohio Prison Yard

Okian Warrior sends a report from CNN about an incident last week at a prison in Mansfield, Ohio, where a brawl broke out after a drone dropped a package of drugs into the prison yard. Prison staff had no idea at the time what caused ~75 inmates to gather and fight, but surveillance tapes clearly showed a drone hovering over the yard and dropping a package that turned out to contain tobacco, marijuana, and heroin. A spokesperson for the prison said this was not the first time they've had an incident involving a drone, but they wouldn't go into specifics.

Comments

Re:Hmmm

[gstoddart]

Even with the relatively high value of the cargo, it is still hard to see how the person who delivered it could reasonably expect to be paid for it.

You don't watch many movies, do you? Or missed the whole thing where the Mexican cartel guy had a tunnel excavated under the prison and "nobody noticed"?

As much as it sounds like a Hollywood fantasy, it's not like people in prison have no contact with the outside world, and don't have a lot of time on their hands to come up with new ways to work around the system.

Hell, you could do a Tarantino plot about the shit you could drop into a prison yard to create unrest.

Hell, have one drone drop in a bag of weapons and have another with a long zoom televise the the gladiatorial games which ensue.

It really was only a matter of time until drugs and other stuff started getting dropped into prisons. People have been doing low tech versions of this for decades, if not centuries.

Prisoners are a capative audience...

[__aaclcg7560]

Must be a test run of Amazon's new delivery service. I hope that the home service delivers to the door and not drop packages willy-nilly in the yard.

Re:Hmmm

[wbr1]

I have been to prison. The payment occurs other ways. Could be mailed.. could be visiting room hand off. Could be a guard taking the money out for a cut. Very rare is extortion of someone on the outside. This ain't hollywood.

Another indication of the failed war on drugs

[XxtraLarGe]

They can't even keep drugs out of the prisons WITHOUT drone delivery. The entire war on drugs has cost the U.S. untold billions of dollars and what do we have to show for it? We'd be much better off as a country if everything was legalized and the money currently spent on drug war law enforcement/court system/prison system was spent on drug rehab for those who actually developed a problem.

Re:Another indication of the failed war on drugs

[ai4px]

except when the taxing authorities get too greedy! Taxes on cigarettes in NY cause people to smuggle them in, and in the case of one man selling singles, the cost was his life. Making a coveted thing legal is great and I wholeheartedly agree. Thinking you can tax it at a high rate is really no different than making it illegal... the result is a black market.

Re:Another indication of the failed war on drugs

[fafalone]

It's sad the people still have this breakdown in logic and their emotions overwhelm them when it comes to "seriously dangerous" drugs like heroin or crack. Just what part of the problem with these drugs do you think is ameliorated by prohibition? If anything, it's even more critical that these drugs are legalized:
-Cocaine and heroin represent the vast majority of global organized crime and related violence. The exact same points about never stopping other substances apply even harder here. Doesn't matter how "bad" the drugs are, you're never ever going to stop global organized crime from reaping billions upon billions of dollars through prohibition.
-Locally, it's these drugs that are responsible for the large majority of secondary crimes against non-involved parties, such as robbery and property crimes, to fund addictions. People aren't robbing and stealing for their pot or MDMA habits, which I assume aren't "really" hard by your standards. These crimes aren't committed because of the drugs inherent biological response pattern in an addict (unlike alcohol, which DOES make violent behavior more likely), they're committed because prohibition results in a cost structure that puts maintaining a habit very difficult without wealth or crime. Alcohol and cigarettes are cause dependence just as strong in an addict, and I guarantee if an addiction to those cost hundreds of dollars per day, you'd see the exact same related violence.
-Even when it comes to "really hard" drugs, there's simply no evidence that legalization would lead to increased addiction, because do you really think there's thousands and thousands of people just waiting to go out and get addicted to heroin if only it were available from a doctor or pharmacist? It's legal to possess all drugs in Portugal, and they have no such usage spike. When you redirect money towards education and treatment and provide an environment where there's no fear of arrest for admitting you're a user, usage rates actually drop.
-With the financial and other aspects of acquisition, addicts are unable to hold jobs for a variety of reasons, and as heroin maintenance programs in other countries have shown, a steady cheap legal supply returns these people to functional, contributing members of society that can hold down jobs. And obviously there's health benefits associated with a legal pharmaceutical supply like OD prevention the most well known.
-People like to talk about "the children"... what kind of world do you want for yours if they wind up experimenting? A felony where getting caught twice or violating probation requirements means a lifetime of stigma. Interacting with dangerous criminal gangs to get an unknown product. Prison. Stigma attached to getting help. There is ZERO evidence that if we just crack down harder we're suddenly going to win the war on drugs and heroin, meth, and coke will vanish from the world, so no matter how much you wish that were the case, you're stuck with the reality that drugs are everywhere and kids experiment. If my kids made that mistake, I'd want them to get a safe product from a medical professional and be provided with non-abstinence-based education and have stigma-free access to well funded help and not be labeled a criminal and tossed into a cage and branded for life if they get caught. What do you want for yours? "a drug free world" is NOT an option.

Re:Can we please stop...

[Spy Handler]

Drones are to RC aircraft what dogs are to wolves. They are almost the same and have 99% identical DNA, but there are a few key characteristics that set them apart.

First, drones require little to no flying skills on the part of the operator. Think RC helicopters from >10 years ago, very difficult to fly and maintain (especially piston-engine choppers, which you had to have if you wanted any kind of serious flying capability). You had to be an expert to not only fly one, but also build and service it. Nowadays you buy a quadcopter and it's ready to go, literally right out of the box with zero setup or adjustments. Modern electronics and gyros means you need no skill whatsoever to fly; just push the throttle and hold it and it hovers.

Second, some drones have autonomous capability. With built-in GPS and advanced algorithms, they fly themselves. You punch in pre-programmed waypoints and the drone will fly there, loiter and drop a payload or take pictures or whatever, and fly back to you. It's not remote controlled anymore.

Third, "drone" is easier to say than "RC model aircraft", which is a mouthful and requires explaining what RC stands for if you're writing a news article.

Re:Makes me think about North/South Korea border

[StikyPad]

I wonder how long it will be before drones are more heavily regulated than firearms.

Drones mirror the Internet

[kheldan]

Just like the Internet, they're a wonderful, innovative, imaginative idea originally developed by inspired, educated minds, created with the full intention of being something helpful to mankind.. and just like the Internet, are now being twisted and perverted into something to aid and abet acts of stupidity and criminal activity.

I like these precise little drones, I think they're pretty damned cool, really, especially since I saw the earlier videos of whole fleets of them, flying in complex, dynamic, ever-changing formations, like some aerial court dance; it made me wonder what incredible things can we do with this? But then people had to get their hands on them, and do stupid things with them, and now criminal things with them. Now they're going to be on a downward slide towards being illegal for the average person to own, or at least so highly regulated that you may as well not bothers. Nice going, people, great job fucking up something cool for 99.99% of us yet again.

Re:EMP

[jklovanc]

Is it possible to fashion an 'EMP gun' to at least direct the majority of the pulse at a target?

And then that pulse hits parts of the security system and it goes offline.

Maybe just a jammer to interrupt either the GPS signal (or more likely) the remote control signal.

It is against FCC rules to deploy radio wave jammers. The FCC won't even allow prisons to jam cell phones.

Re:contraband cellphones are persistant problem

[wbr1]

Many prisons are starting to use stingray type devices. If they cannot jam, they will track. Enough data points from called persons will easily track down the potential owners of a phone.

http://www.ibtimes.com/new-tec...

I was never a gang member, but due to my background I was the 'fix-it' guy. See if you can make a soldering gun out of pencil and an AC adapter. Then use it to desolder parts from devices to fix others...

I was a fair hand at this trade, and because it was pretty harmless, most of the guards ignored it. I was however trusted, and often phones came to me to either fix a busted charger/charge port, or for flip phones with a hard to conceal charging base, wire in a different charging mechanism. Those were fun jobs. Far better than replacing the thermal fuse in a fan coil.