Ontario prisons seeing more drone drops
Criminals often flying contraband right to inmates’ windows, guards union says
Criminals are making big money airlifting drugs, cellphones and weapons into prisons with highend drones, often flying them right up to an inmate’s cell window, the guards’ union says.
“They can fly them right to a given window and drop them off,” Jeffrey Wilkins, national president of Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, said in an interview. “They reach out and grab.”
“They can GPS locate things,” Wilkins added. “This is big business for inmates … This has to do a lot with the drug trade.”
Drones routinely drop off drugs, weapons, tobacco, cellphones and cellphone equipment like chargers onto prison grounds, he said.
Over the past month, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) reported seizing roughly $441,900 worth of contraband such as tobacco, marijuana, hashish and shatter (cannabis concentrate), as well as cellphones and cellphone accessories at the Collins Bay and Joyceville institutions, two of its Kingston, Ont.,-area facilities.
The CSC said they suspected the contraband arrived in drone drops, adding it’s fighting back hard against drone traffic, with some success.
“CSC has noted an increase in successful seizures of drone packages, thanks to the diligent work of our staff,” spokesperson Kevin Antonucci said in an email.
Occasionally, people are charged, like last August, when two Montreal men were charged with trying to fly a drone laden with tobacco, hashish and marijuana into Collins Bay.
“We continue to respond to the threat posed by drones with a layered approach which includes the use of security practices, adoption of new technologies, intelligence activities and infrastructure enhancements,” Antonucci said.
These countermeasures include drone and cellphone detection technologies, body scanning, training detector dogs to find electronic devices, intelligence gathering and improving infrastructure, Antonucci said.
Criminals are constantly testing the limits of anti-drone measures inside prisons as Corrections Canada moves to tighten up its antidrone security, Wilkins said.
That includes sending fleets of drones over prison yards at the same time to see which ones are detected.
“Institutions where you see one or two in a day, we’re now seeing five at a time,” Wilkins said.
Wilkins said that drone activity was reported on 156 days at Collins Bay Penitentiary in 2023.
“They’re a very common occurrence,” Wilkins said.
During that time, 354 weapons were seized by Collins Bay guards, along with 45 pounds of tobacco, 41 pounds of marijuana, 1.24 pounds of shatter, a potent form of hashish oil, 2.6 pounds of meth and 241 cellphones, along with $276,000 from one individual cell, Wilkins said.
Collins Bay has more than 700 minimum, medium and maximum security inmates and more than 570 staff.
“There’s many that aren’t caught,” Wilkins said. “They’re pretty hefty paydays.”
The union is blaming the dronerelated drug trade in prisons for what it calls an upswing in violence against inmates and guards over the past five years.
“It’s unprecedented, right now, the amount of violence we’re seeing in institutions,” Wilkins said.
The drone situation has brought out a number of private companies like D-Fend Solutions who said they offer solutions to the illegal traffic.
Shooting the drones out of the air might sound simple, but it could have dangerous consequences, the company said.
“Kinetic solutions involving various methods of physically shooting the drone are very risky in crowded environments, as the projectile, falling drone, or debris could seriously injure guards and prisoners,” the company noted.
“The company applies these skills to continuously develop new capabilities, with an eye to proactively build next-generation solutions and always staying a drone threat ahead.”
Meanwhile, Wilkins said he can see the day when a prisoner is airlifted out of custody by a particularly high-powered drove.
“That’s next,” he grimly predicted.