A drone probably not unlike the one carrying the drugs that fell into the Ohio prison. Photo via Flickr user Don McCullough
Read: How to Protect Yourself from Violence in Prison
At 2:30 PM on July 29, a robot hovered above the Mansfield Correctional Facility in Ohio. From its bowels dropped a set of items bound to cause chaos once plopped into the centre in a prison yard: five ounces of tobacco, 2.3 ounces of weed, and 0.2 ounces of heroin. As the Columbus Dispatch notes, if the smack was half-pure, that amount would contain about 140 doses.
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Given the combined value of all those drugs behind bars, it’s pretty unlikely that the person controlling the drone was a mere prankster. In fact, Department of Rehabilitation and Correction spokeswoman JoEllen Smith told the Dispatch that this has happened before, in different prisons, and that drone awareness is becoming a priority among the agency’s security administrators.
For further proof that drones are becoming the future of smuggling, one crashed in a California supermarket parking lot in January as part of a failed crystal meth operation out of Mexico. Sylvia Longmire, a drug war analyst, told CNN at the time that cartels had previously used drones for surveillance, but the crash signalled new territory for them.
As expected, madness reigned as a result of the recent attempt to drop a bunch of valuable, mind-altering substances into a mass of bored criminals. About 200 prisoners fought over the package, which was, at one point, tossed over a fence from the facility’s north yard to it’s south one, according to the Dispatch.
Officers eventually subdued the inmates with pepper spray and put nine people in solitary confinement.
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