Prisons have a drone problem. In August, a drug-carrying drone was caught ferrying half a pound of various drugs into Ohio's Mansfield Correctional Facility, sparking a full-blown fight when it landed in the yard. A year earlier, a similar landing took place at a maximum security prison in South Carolina, followed by another in Australia. At the same time, French officials struggled with a rash of unexplained flights near nuclear plants, suggesting the threat isn't limited to prisons.
It's a classic technological imbalance: for a few hundred dollars, anyone can buy a machine capable of out-flying most of the security measures in place at an open-air facility. The FAA's drone registration proposal may even the odds a little, but law enforcement agencies are still surprisingly out-gunned if they need to take down a hostile drone. Short of shooting it down, what can a police officer or prison guard do?
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