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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.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:06PM (1 child)
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
"I've known a few like you, whether it be prison IT or prison psychology."
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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.
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"Prisoners, especially American prisoners, are fiercely pragmatic creatures. They will outsmart you given the chance."
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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.
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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.