a drone carrying heroin, marijuana, and tobacco dropped its payload over a prison yard crowded with inmates, causing a brief melee before authorities stamped out the brawl with pepper spray, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC).
Local media reported Tuesday that the July 29 melee at the Mansfield Correctional Institution began moments after a drone let loose with the goods. At least nine inmates began fighting over the package while other inmates rushed toward the brawl.
Hmm, time for cryo prisons? Or should the drug delivery man switch to drones that can travel through the plumbing?
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Drone Drops Drugs Into Ohio Prison Yard, Inmate Brawl Ensues
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(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:11PM
Until someone uses drones to drop GUNS in prison yards, bought second hand for cash at gun shows (and so effectively untraceable).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:30PM
That has been done. Packages tied to cats. Thrown over the fence. Catapulted from blocks away. Packages dropped from planes with parachutes. Mini helicopters. Name it. Someone either has tried it or will.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anne Nonymous on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:33PM
> Packages tied to cats. Catapulted from blocks away.
Meeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooowwwwww.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:37PM
What if the cat decided to get high off a drug package. Will it be gang executed for stealing contraband from a drug lord? Will it go on the gangs wanted list as a lesson to all other cats for daring to defy the drug lords and steal from them? Will someone please think of the kittens!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:34PM
what about 'homing' birds ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @12:05AM
They are typically trained to fly home. The trouble you'd have is training them to fly to the prison.
Other than homing pigeons, which can't really carry a lot of weight, I don't know what other birds can be trained in this manner and would be able to carry a reasonable amount of weight to be useful for this purpose even if they can be trained to fly to a prison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:31PM
Or tools that can help inmates escape. Perhaps that's partly how El Chapo managed to escape.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:36PM
I think El Chapo just gave orders, and his lieutenants took care of all the details. Seriously, one guy didn't buy the land to begin construction of a house, dig that tunnel, and build the little loco-bike in the tunnel, all while showing up for roll call in a jail cell. El Chapo didn't need any tools - he speaks, and the tools just do all the work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:40PM
Sure, of course, but how did his minions sneak stuff into jail. Perhaps he (or his network) used drones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:23PM
Unlikely, there would be no reason to go through the prison when they could start at the unwatched residence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:24PM
Agreed, it was just a suggestion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @07:53PM
It is unlikely but everything else surrounding El Chapo that did happen was also very unlikely. The whole story looks like it came out of a Hollywood movie so nothing would surprise me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:52PM
Why 80 Percent Of Mexicans Don’t Believe The Official Story On El Chapo’s Escape [thinkprogress.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:46PM
> Until someone uses drones to drop GUNS in prison yards, bought second hand for cash at gun shows (and so effectively untraceable).
Guns are not generally useful in prison because they draw so much attention when used. It makes them single-use and a guarantee of being caught. A cool movie plot, but not much value in real life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:48PM
Seems like a good way to create a distraction. This was probably just a fuck-up and not intentional, such things usually are, but man look at the reaction.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:37PM
Sure you could violate human rights... or put up a drone net.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Francis on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:24PM
They're prisoners, they've waived most of those rights.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:29PM
> They're prisoners, they've waived most of those rights.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:13PM
So, you're OK with them having access to firearms, alcohol and other things which were likely involved in them being sent away in the first place?
I highly doubt that somebody writing in 19th century Russia was referring to anything remotely like what's happening in a 21st century American prison. Prisons of that era were brutal places well above and beyond what's found in the developed world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:41PM
Sounds like you have never been in one.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:48PM
So, you're OK with them having access to firearms, alcohol and other things which were likely involved in them being sent away in the first place?
I am honestly curious as to why you think that treating all rights as indistinguishably interchangeable makes for a convincing argument. Surely you know its not true, so why is that your best defense? Are you trolling?
I highly doubt that somebody writing in 19th century Russia was referring to anything remotely like what's happening in a 21st century American prison. Prisons of that era were brutal places well above and beyond what's found in the developed world.
And when Dostoevsky wrote that, there were people just like you saying the exact same thing - how modern russian prisons under the tzars are so much better than what had come before. Better a prison than a pogrom!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:24PM
Because the person I was disagreeing with seemed to think that you don't waive any of your rights when you get caught committing a crime and sentenced to prison. Yes, I do know that there's genuinely innocent people in prison, but for practical reasons, you give up damn near all your rights when you go to prison. There's a reason why the process to restore your civil rights exists. It's because you've lost a number of rights such as the right to vote and potentially drink beer and so forth.
Now, had the person I responded to bothered to bring some clarity, the comment wouldn't have really been appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:43PM
Because the person I was disagreeing with seemed to think that you don't waive any of your rights when you get caught committing a crime and sentenced to prison.
Uh no, you are the only one who tried to group all civil rights together, equating gun rights with the right to not be forced into a medically induced coma - that was your premise, not anyone else's.
Yes, I do know that there's genuinely innocent people in prison,
And that is a red herring. Maybe you are talking to somebody else?
Now, had the person I responded to bothered to bring some clarity, the comment wouldn't have really been appropriate.
Clarity to a well known Dostoevsky quote? Did you think it meant something other than what everybody has been thinking it meant for over a hundred years? Of course you understood the meaning perfectly well because you went on to try and argue that it doesn't apply to prisons in the "developed world."
What I get from your posts is, "prisoners are subhuman so fuck them." Any attempt to examine that belief more closely causes you to throw as much random, even contradictory, shit at the wall and hope something sticks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @02:12PM
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html [nizkor.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Structure [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @07:19PM
You should investigate California's SHUs (Special Housing Units) within their prisons.
The Pelican Bay SHU is particularly notorious.
How long do you think you could tolerate solitary confinement before you went off the deep end?
Months? Years?
...and to be put into solitary, all you have to do is have some reading material that prison employees think is politically unacceptable.
Not ratting out a "gang member" is another SHU-punishable offense.
You can just imagine the number of "gang members" who are ratted out (with no other evidence) and are then put into the SHU so that the accuser does not receive that treatment.
USA also has more people in prison than any other country--though it is only the 5th largest county in population, with China and India each having 4x USA's population.
1 of every 4 prison inmates worldwide is in the USA.
Are USAians many times more evil than people in other places--or is the USA "justice" system completely perverse?
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:28PM
How, exactly, did they waive their rights by being in prison? Are they no longer human? Even in war, our opponents still have rights, codified in the Geneva Conventions.
Here's my image-based argument [twimg.com] that shows your position is bullshit.
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:14PM
I've never understood why cryoprisons were a viable punishment. The whole point of traditional prison is to make someone serve time. They have to actually spend the time in prison-- cognoscente and aware of the passage of time. Specifically, that time and society are passing without them. The punishment is knowing that a portion of your life is being taken from you. Time you'll never get back. For some people it'd be time to reflect and reform. Or to suffer. But in all cases, it requires experiencing each and every second.
But a cyroprison-- where's the punishment? The prisoner goes to sleep, and instantly wakes up. Sentence done. For some, perhaps, having the world move on without them is a loss. Family and friends are older, or dead, when they get out, sure. But what of the disaffected ones-- the ones with no real meaningful ties anyways. They just wake up to a different world, and are no worse off than they were before. They might even be better off-- who knows what they're waking up to. Better technology, medicine? Perhaps a more lenient and compassionate society? Heck, I'm sure there are lots of people right now who would consider it a bonus to be able to be frozen for a hundred or a thousand years, and effectively timetravel to the future.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:50PM
> They just wake up to a different world, and are no worse off than they were before.
While I agree with you in general, I think you are grossly underestimating the difficulty of re-integrating into society after being 'frozen' for a couple of decades. It's a problem for regular prisoners - there are people getting out of prison who went in before cell phones existed. They are comparative dinosaurs - adjusting to a couple of decades worth of social and technological change in the space of a few months is profoundly difficult, with or without family and friends to support them in the process. The world simply does not work the way they were taught any more.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:09PM
This can't have been the first time it has happened and it clearly won't be the last. I do wonder how they'll change prison design to cope with this. Will all yards be turned into cages by putting a roof (chain-link or some kind of net) on top of the yard.
Can't really have guards opening up on any flying drone object to, or possibly they could but I wouldn't want to be close by as the shots start flying. Guess someone will come up with some kind of anti-drone-weapon and sell to the various department of corrections across the land and make a fortune.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:33PM
>Guess someone will come up with some kind of anti-drone-weapon
A shotgun?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:35AM
Nowadays we have a bunch of tech that could detect 'things flying in the area' on a relatively low budget: lots of cheap outdoor cameras and object tracking in software might work, radar might work, sensors to detect and track EMF emissions might work, etc. With a bit of flight path analysis you could probably count out almost all the birds/kites/plastic bags.
As you mentioned, the tricky part is what to do with the data. Most offensive options are out because you'd inevitably hit birds or bystanders. You don't want to be putting everybody on alert each time the system reports a high probability because you're guaranteed to mostly have false alarms. Frequency jamming would probably work fine right now but wouldn't do a damn thing once autonomous drones become more common (and GPS jamming is pretty illegal while being possible to work around)
So yeah, after you run through the technology you just end up with 'put up a big net'. The free market will come up with some nice systems involving lasers or anti-drone-drones or specially trained hawks, which most prisons will not implement unless it becomes a serious problem for them.
I'm looking forward to the first few amazon drones being taken out before they blacklist prisons from their potential delivery locations.