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.
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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 drugs within prison,” drones are “one of the worst symptoms we’ve seen in a long, long time.” According to Venables, the past decade has seen a considerable shift in the mindset of prison culture, both among the jailers and the jailed, toward fear of unknown elements introduced through drone drops. Carrying the illness metaphor forward, Venables says that the issue has taken corrections from “a niggling cold to being bedridden.”
Efforts to curb drone incursions across Canada have been variable. In a statement to The Walrus, CSC emphasized their investment in “drone detection systems, body scanners, and other digital technologies” aimed at tackling the problem. The organization holds an exemption to the federal regulation that prohibits the use of radiocommunication jammers, and while pilot programs for drone-detecting and radio frequency–jamming technologies have been proposed in Quebec and Saskatchewan, details of these programs have been sparse.
When questioned about their regional program, a spokesperson for Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Community Safety, which oversees policing and provincial correctional facilities, declined to offer any detail, instead replying in a statement that “while unauthorized drone activity is not currently a significant concern,” the ministry is taking “a proactive approach to addressing emerging drone-related risk.”
Venables commends Canada’s collaborative approach not only between its different law enforcement agencies but its willingness to work with American civil authorities. Thanks to these motivated efforts, there have been many examples of police apprehending smugglers before, during, or just after drone drops, including at Stony Mountain, though coming across such incidents can also be a matter of luck—requiring citizen tips, sharp eyes, and quick action. Some facilities have reported progress, including several in Kingston, Ontario, where an anti-drone task force links the Kingston Police Intelligence Unit, the CSC, and the Canada Border Services Agency. Others, however, including Stony Mountain, are set to lose detector dogs, mobile patrol vehicles, and officer positions in upcoming federal budget reductions.
Cuts like these, Suelzle says, show the CSC is too much of a slow-moving bureaucracy to fight a technological arms race against smuggling—“By the time we get a drone detector, it’s obsolete,” he says—let alone address the foundational issues plaguing prison culture. “Twenty-five years ago, we were having this conversation about tobacco introduction. Now we’re having it about fentanyl. The substance has changed, but the conversation’s exactly the same. There’s been no adjustment. It’s the same names; it’s the same gangs. We still respond in the same way we always have or don’t respond in the same way we always have.”
Prisons are designed as the ultimate controlled environment, but, says Venables, “people forget that prison is a community,” a place where the social structure is organized around access to the inaccessible. A former inmate of Stony Mountain, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, described an intraprison culture dominated by smuggling operations controlled by organized crime. “Whoever has control of that,” he said, “has control of the institution.”
The gangs—among which he listed the Hells Angels, the Manitoba Warriors, the Indian Posse, the Bloods, and the Crips—all operate within a command economy unconstrained by regulation and enforced through violence and retribution. “Anything they tell you, you have to do,” the former inmate says. “When they told me that I had to go stab somebody, or beat somebody up, or sell drugs, or inject them with steroids, or inject them with morphine, I had to do everything they said, or they would just beat me up. . . . These are the people that can’t be fucked with.”
Drones have exposed a multitude of weaknesses in prison infrastructure, thinning the walls between within and without to a veneer of security. The control that some inmates can command beyond the prison walls is considerable, and drones suggest an evolution of that control, through their frequency and unpredictability; as it ever was, it’s in the outside world that payments for prison transactions often take place and from where orders for contraband are placed through illicit cellphones or via correctional officers themselves. Only now, the chances of catching the perpetrators are slimmer than ever. With drones, Suelzle says, “the accountability on any specific inmate or person is much harder to determine.”
In June, one Stony Mountain prisoner was sentenced over a cache worth more than $1.2 million found in his cell—the largest drug seizure in the prison’s history; his time was extended by more than eight years for organizing the ingress of drugs via drone. However, the former inmate described such sentences as “not really that big of a deal for people who are already serving years. And some people are even in there for life, so they don’t really give a shit about being caught with some drugs.”
When I asked the former inmate, who had served some of his time at Stony Mountain for attempting to smuggle in contraband, what prisons might do to mitigate the problem, he seemed incredulous. “That’s not even the question you really want to ask,” he said. “The question is: Do you think that they really care? . . . It’s not productive. It’s not rehabilitation. They call it corrections, but it’s not correcting anything.”
