Drones Delivering Contraband Are Swarming a Manitoba Prison

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.