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posted by martyb on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-issue-hunting-permits dept.

Officials at the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, South Carolina say that a prisoner escaped by using wire cutters flown in by a drone:

A fugitive South Carolina inmate recaptured in Texas this week had chopped his way through a prison fence using wire cutters apparently dropped by a drone, prison officials said Friday. Jimmy Causey, 46, fled the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, S.C., on the evening of July 4th after leaving a paper mache doll in his bed to fool guards into thinking he was asleep. He was not discovered missing until Wednesday afternoon.

[...] The director said he and other officials have sought federal help for years to combat the use of drones to drop contraband into prison. "It's a simple fix," Stirling said. "Allow us to block the signal. Allow us to stop them to have unfettered access ... They are physically incarcerated, but they are not virtually incarcerated." "As long as they have access to cellphones, this is just going to keep on happening and happening and happening," he said, The Post and Courier reported.

Also at LA Times and The Washington Post.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:44PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:44PM (#536618)

    I have worked in a number of prison facilities ; thus I have knowledge of how these places are run.

    Strip searches are ( or should be ) standard procedure after visits. This means that the way most inmates get cell phones is with the help of a guard who is paid to smuggle the phone into the facility. Yes, guards are often crooked. Guards are quite frankly worse scum than many of the inmates, and anyone who has spent time around a prison can verify this.

    It would be trivially easy to detect cell phone signals from within the prison. Guards or other prison personnel are typically not allowed to use their personal cell phones while in the facility. This means that any cell signal would probably be associated with a phone being in the hands of a person who should not have it, and that would mean it's time for a shakedown of the entire facility, which usually will produce other fun things ( like shanks, AKA home made knives ).

    The perimeter of the prison should be equipped with laser alarms which sound when the beam is triggered. This sort of alarm setup means that unless a tunnel is used it is impossible to escape without an alarm being sounded.

    Frankly it sounds like the prison in question was run and staffed by incompetents. When they re-capture the escapee they should send him to the Federal ADX in Florence Colorado. He would never escape from there, nor will anyone else.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:58PM (#536621)

    The perimeter of the prison should be equipped with high power lasers just like the ones in Resident Evil.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:11PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:11PM (#536625)

      The Federal prisons I've visited all used guards who constantly drove around the outside perimeter ( on a road which borders the outside of two fences which are outside of the laser alarm perimeter ).

      These guards all carry an M-16. The M-16 would achieve the same end result as the lasers you mention, and they cost a lot less.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:31PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:31PM (#536629)

        It really worked for this guy.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:22AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:22AM (#536717)

          The guy didn't escape from a Federal prison. You need to work on your reading comprehension.

  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:06PM (1 child)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:06PM (#536636) Homepage

    I've known a few like you, whether it be prison IT or prison psychology.

    Prisoners, especially American prisoners, are fiercely pragmatic creatures. They will outsmart you given the chance.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:14AM (#536726)

      "I've known a few like you, whether it be prison IT or prison psychology."
      .
      .

      Ahh, but you are off the mark with your guess. I said I had worked in some prisons, but I didn't say what kind of work I did. I worked as an inmate, not as staff or contracted employee. That's right, I was locked up in these prisons so I had lots of time to observe and think about stuff. My opinion after years of observation for the Federal prisons in which I was an inmate was that escape was close to impossible without help from outside the prison or from staff who worked in the prison. Records of actual escapes from Federal prisons support my opinion, by the way.
      .
      .

      "Prisoners, especially American prisoners, are fiercely pragmatic creatures. They will outsmart you given the chance."
      .
      .

      I hate to burst your bubble, but most American prisoners are really stupid AND horribly uneducated. There are rare exceptions, but they don't tend to mix with other inmates. The reality is not that the prisoners will "outsmart" the prison staff, the reality is that prisoners have 24 hours a day 7 days a week to think about whatever they want to think about ( which could include making hooch or planning an escape or making a shank, or any number of other things ) whereas prison staff only think about prison stuff for 8 hours a day five days per week. The prisoner has, in other words, the benefit of vast amounts of free time in which he can do whatever he likes, within certain limits. The situation is similar to the old idea about a million monkeys sitting at typewriters eventually ending up writing a Shakespeare play, in that even idiots can cook up schemes that will work if there is enough time available for scheming.
      .

      But escape IS rare, because as idiotic as prison staff are ( and they ARE a bunch of stupid people, trust me ) they have ( on the Federal level anyway ) taken numerous carefully considered preemptive measures to prevent escape. They also have an on-site team of guys who are basically a SWAT team, based near the prison, and that team is ready to do whatever is necessary ( ready to kill people, in other words ) to suppress unwanted behavior. However, you can be sure that a state prison in South Carolina is not run as well as most any Federal prison, just as the average cop is not as smart or well educated as an FBI agent. So an escape plan that might work in a South Carolina state prison is unlikely to succeed in a Federal prison.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday July 09 2017, @12:14AM (1 child)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday July 09 2017, @12:14AM (#536697) Homepage

    This means that any cell signal would probably be associated with a phone being in the hands of a person who should not have it

    How good are we at pinpointing the location of a cell signal? Good enough that someone loitering in the parking lot wouldn't trigger the system?

    The perimeter of the prison should be equipped with laser alarms which sound when the beam is triggered.

    No, the perimeter of the prison should be equipped with something called a "wall."

    Lasers have no use in this case and would cause far more problems than they would solve.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:37AM (#536720)

      "No, the perimeter of the prison should be equipped with something called a "wall."
      Lasers have no use in this case and would cause far more problems than they would solve."

      .
      .

      You don't know anything about the subject of prison security, that is painfully obvious.

      Laser perimeter alarms ( which are typically several hundred feet INSIDE the fence or wall ) will be tripped by anyone who approaches the fence or wall and the alarm will be triggered, before the person who triggered the alarm can reach the fence or wall. The laser alarm system allows the guards to pinpoint the location of the laser beam breach and quickly respond. I doubt such a system was in place and operating at the prison the inmate escaped from, because if it was the inmate would not have been able to escape through the fence, since the guards would have arrived and captured the inmate before the inmate had time to cut the fence.

      The laser alarms work. I have seen them work. You're wrong if you think the laser alarms have no use. I'm sure the people who run prisons would find your opinion humorous though.