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.

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.