
Dangerous actors use drones to threaten jails, prisons
By DRONELIFE Options Editor Jim Magill
That is the second in a sequence of articles, inspecting the issues posed to crucial infrastructure websites and different important potential targets of drone incursions by hostile actors. Half one described present federal legal guidelines pertaining to the usage of counter-drone know-how.
This text will discover the issues that drones flown for nefarious functions can current to jails and prisons.
Jails and prisons in the USA and internationally are dealing with a rising drawback of criminals delivering contraband by way of drone to inmates. And lots of officers concern that the weaponization of drones, seen in battle areas throughout the globe, may quickly turn out to be a significant drawback in nations which are in any other case at peace.
Earlier this month, two suspects had been arrested after allegedly trying to make use of drones to carry contraband, together with methamphetamines, cell telephones and tobacco, into the McConnell state jail unit in Bee County, Texas. Within the UK, a latest report discovered there have been 1,296 drone incidents at prisons in England and Wales within the 10 months ending in October 2024, a 10-fold improve since 2020, in accordance with the Guardian.
“From a legal perspective drones are sometimes used for smuggling contraband into safety areas, reminiscent of prisons,” Scott Parker, chief of unmanned plane safety on the U.S. Division of Homeland Safety’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, mentioned in an interview.
Emery Nelson, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), mentioned the issue of contraband supply by drone on the nation’s prisons has elevated in recent times. “We’ve got had extra confirmed sightings and contraband introductions by way of drones than ever earlier than, together with a rise within the variety of areas the place these occasions happen,” he mentioned in an electronic mail assertion.
The BOP, which homes about 143,000 federal inmates, started to formally observe drone incidents at its federal amenities in 2018, and the info reveals the variety of reported incidents greater than doubled within the first 12 months of monitoring, from 23 in 2018 to 57 in 2019. More moderen information was not obtainable, Nelson mentioned.
He mentioned the BOP employs a multi-faceted strategy to forestall contraband from coming into its amenities, together with that delivered by drones. We proactively analysis, rigorously consider and deploy rising and confirmed safety applied sciences and practices to detect, interdict and mitigate harmful contraband,” he mentioned.
He declined to debate particular safety practices or counter-drone applied sciences the bureau employed, however the BOP “has labored intently with the Division of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to limit airspace (drone flyover safety) for 109 of our 122 establishments.” Guidelines for the deployment of counter-drone mitigation measures that may be legally undertaken at federal prisons are spelled out in a federal statute, 6 USC 124n: Safety of Sure Services and Property from Unmanned Plane.
The regulation requires the secretary of the Division of Homeland Safety and the U.S. Lawyer Basic, in coordination with the secretary of Transportation, to develop for his or her respective departments sure actions to guard jail amenities from malicious drone exercise. These actions can embody: detecting, figuring out, monitoring and monitoring an unmanned plane; warning the operator of the UAV; disrupting management of the drone by interfering with its radio alerts; seizing management of the UAV; seizing or in any other case confiscating the drone itself; and utilizing “cheap drive, if crucial, to disable, harm, or destroy the unmanned plane system or unmanned plane.”
Drone incursions current potential threats to native jails
The issue exists throughout the panorama of correctional amenities, from federal and state prisons to native jails. Shawn Laughlin, president of the American Jail Affiliation, mentioned the three,000 members of his affiliation fear that Congress is just not doing sufficient to move legal guidelines to counteract the drone supply of contraband to the nation’s huge community of jails and holding amenities.
“About 8 million individuals get processed to a neighborhood jail yearly,” he mentioned in an interview. “About 7.2 million of these individuals get launched again into the neighborhood. So, it’s an enormous churn, provided that on any given day, about 750,000 people sit in native county and metropolis correctional amenities, jails.”
This creates an enormous potential marketplace for the supply of contraband, which is being stuffed by organized legal gangs and worldwide cartels, significantly in states alongside the southern border of the U.S., he mentioned. Subsequently, drone detection and mitigation has turn out to be a scorching subject amongst AJA’s members. Laughlin mentioned the affiliation recurrently solutions queries from its jail operator members as to what to do when confronted with a drone that’s being operated suspiciously.
“The very first thing we inform them is you possibly can’t shoot it down. That’s clearly the very first query we get is what weaponry may very well be used to shoot it down,” he mentioned. “There’s some cool stuff on the market, like internet weapons, and in Europe, they’ve skilled falcons and eagles to take them down or ship a drone to take down a (suspicious) drone.”
Nonetheless, within the U.S., FAA and Federal Communications Fee guidelines restrict the form of counter-drone applied sciences that jails can deploy to those who establish and observe drones throughout the facility’s airspace, and even then, “there are solely two or three obtainable applied sciences which are available on the market that they will deploy.”
Laughlin, who in his day job is a police commander in Broomfield, Colorado, mentioned one other pending drone-related drawback that the nation’s correctional establishments are dealing with is the specter of UAVs carrying weapons, which may very well be used to threaten jail amenities and personnel.
“The weaponization of those drones and the power for them to hold weapon payload simply scares the crap out of us,” he mentioned. “We’ve seen, in Central America, assassination makes an attempt with them and also you’ve bought the madness of what’s occurring in Ukraine proper now and on the Gaza Strip.”
He mentioned he worries that the identical weaponization know-how may quickly be utilized in the USA and “corrections or regulation enforcement officers, who’re mainly defenseless sitting in an establishment or out on perimeter guarding these establishments.”
Though there are a number of payments pending earlier than Congress to handle the problem of potential threats posed by the malicious use of drones normally, not sufficient consideration is being paid to the precise issues confronted by correctional establishments, Laughlin mentioned.
“A lot of the focus appears to be in and round airports,” he mentioned. “However fairly frankly, Congress doesn’t appear to be actually receptive about this factor being a lot of a problem because it pertains to correctional establishments.”
He referred to as on Congress to enact laws to provide correctional amenities reminiscent of native jails larger authority to deploy extra strong counter-drone measures in opposition to UAV’s that pose potential threats.
“Even with a drone-detection system, I would know {that a} drone’s coming and I would know the place it got here from, if the know-how’s adequate, however I don’t know what they dropped,” he mentioned.
“So, it doesn’t matter what, 100% of the time, I’ve to lock down my total campus, cease all inmate programming, cease inmate actions, cease authorized visits, cease church companies. You have to cease every little thing to ship workers out to search out out if contraband ended up getting onto the property,” Laughlin mentioned. “And that’s a degree that’s usually neglected by our legislators and regulators.”
Need DRONELIFE information delivered to your inbox each weekday? Enroll right here.
Learn extra:
Jim Magill is a Houston-based author with nearly a quarter-century of expertise overlaying technical and financial developments within the oil and fuel business. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P International Platts, Jim started writing about rising applied sciences, reminiscent of synthetic intelligence, robots and drones, and the methods through which they’re contributing to our society. Along with DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared within the Houston Chronicle, U.S. Information & World Report, and Unmanned Programs, a publication of the Affiliation for Unmanned Automobile Programs Worldwide.


Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, an expert drone companies market, and a fascinated observer of the rising drone business and the regulatory atmosphere for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles targeted on the business drone house and is a global speaker and acknowledged determine within the business. Miriam has a level from the College of Chicago and over 20 years of expertise in excessive tech gross sales and advertising and marketing for brand new applied sciences.
For drone business consulting or writing, Electronic mail Miriam.
TWITTER:@spaldingbarker
Subscribe to DroneLife right here.