Prisoners have found a new way of getting contraband behind bars: Drones

The days of paying off guards and baking files into cakes are over: Now, contraband is being smuggled into U.S. prisons via drones.

At the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina, security cameras picked up red lights late one night, and a guard went out to investigate. She saw a man running away into the forest, but it wasn't until later that a package with tobacco, a cellphone, and marijuana was found in the power lines, with a drone that crashed nearby. In the woods, prison officials discovered a campground with the drone's remote control and drugs. "It was a delivery system," Bryan P. Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told The New York Times. "They were sending in smaller amounts in repeated trips. They would put it on there, they would deliver it, someone inside would get it somehow, and they would send it back out and send more in."

Law enforcement officials have no idea how many successful drop-offs have happened, and say they are hard to prevent. It's likely that more and more attempts will take place, as inmates and their families are willing to pay high prices for items like cellphones — iPhones can fetch $1,000 — which can't be monitored or recorded, allowing a gang leader to continue to do business behind bars, and can be used to coordinate deliveries with drone operators. Stirling said he's had to learn a lot about drones over the past year in order to fight them, and didn't realize what an issue they would become when he took his post in 2013. "When I started in this job it was all very futuristic," he said. "Now it's something we're having to devote extensive resources to. We put up higher fences to stop people from throwing things over them. Now they're just flying over them."

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