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Drones Delivering Contraband Are Swarming a Manitoba Prison

Experts say it’s as easy as ordering off Uber Eats

You make a call, place your order, and, after a brief interim, your package arrives, delivered directly into your hands. Drone delivery is a comely image of modern ease when ordering a take-away supper from home but it is something else altogether when done from inside Manitoba’s Stony Mountain Institution, a multi-rated penitentiary flanked by guards, dogs, and metal detectors. Inside the package may be a variety of valuable and saleable items: fentanyl, cocaine, or methamphetamines; razors or ceramic weapons; tobacco, marijuana, tools, or cellphones. Between February and April of this year, contraband with an estimated institutional value of more than $1 million was intercepted at Stony Mountain, a half-hour drive north of Winnipeg.

Such is the manner of prison smuggling today, which experts readily liken to ordering off Uber Eats. Though old tactics like hand-lobbing items over walls or smuggling them inside on one’s person haven’t completely gone away, they’ve largely been supplanted by drones, which allow couriers to easily make clean, remote deliveries into prisons by dropping payloads into outdoor recreational areas or flying them directly to cell windows. Incidents have been reported across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, with correctional facilities struggling to repel the barrage of unmanned aerial vehicles. Since 2023, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), which administers federal prisons, has dealt with almost 3,000 drone incursions across the country and has seen an increase in drug-related seizures within its institutions over the same time period.

“If it wasn’t for the threat it posed, I’d call it ingenious,” said Jacob Suelzle, a correctional officer and the prairie region president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. He thinks the CSC’s number is a lowball, as often prisons rely on visual detection of drones, leaving them ill-equipped to spot incursions or deal with them if they successfully deliver their shipment. “We don’t know how many drones we don’t see,” said Suelzle. When something is spotted, it can come down to a race between guards and inmates, as “once the package has been recovered by inmates, it’s a matter of seconds before it’s dispersed and put into body cavities.”

Although there have been multiple accounts of contraband apprehended by guards inside of prisons, or by police outside of them, such seizures appear to be in the minority, with Canadian institutions being “literally flooded,” as Suelzle puts it, in drugs and cellphones introduced via drone drops. Drug use within prisons is so high, he says, that correction officers go through Naloxone, a medication used to reverse opioid overdose, “like it’s candy.”

Jack Venables, a British counter-drone researcher who is studying the response of Canada’s prisons to drone technology, says that while “the disease is........

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