Consumer Drones Are Outsmarting America's Prison Security Infrastructure

On the night of March 14, 2026, somewhere around 1 a.m., a neon-green quadcopter drifted over the fence at Marcy Correctional Facility in central New York and dropped a package into the yard. Corrections officers intercepted it. Inside, according to the Associated Press, were two hunting knives — nearly eight inches each — alongside a Motorola phone, bandanas, electric hair trimmers, sheets of paper soaked in an unknown substance, and a green leafy substance wrapped in clear plastic and balloons. The drone was recovered too.

The XPECE One, a $2,299 fishing quadcopter marketed for dropping bait into lakes, is not designed for this. But it is extraordinarily good at it anyway. Waterproof, capable of hauling seven pounds, and available to anyone with $2,299 and a delivery address — it represents a category collision that prisons were never built to handle.

This was not an isolated run. New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Commissioner Daniel Martuscello said the state has recorded roughly a dozen other drone dead-drops at its facilities — a pattern he called an evolving and imminent threat to the state correctional system. The Hochul administration has proposed legislation that would create a criminal offense for flying drones near prisons, restrict flights within 500 feet of state correctional facilities, mandate law enforcement training, and establish an approved technology list for counter-drone use. It has not passed.

The national picture is more alarming. The Federal Bureau of Prisons recorded 23 drone incidents at federal facilities in 2018. By 2024 that number had climbed to 479, according to Fox News — a twentyfold increase in six years. South Carolina Department of Corrections intercepted 250 drone drops in 2024 and 254 in 2025, essentially flat despite aggressive countermeasures, suggesting the problem is not getting better. "We find drones crashed in the woods outside of the penitentiary," Joel Anderson, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told Corrections1. "We find drones crashed at the bases of the fences. We find drones crashed in the yard." He estimates the actual number of drops — including the ones that succeed without detection — could be well over 300 per year in his state alone.

The legal gap is the core problem. State and local prison staff cannot legally shoot down, jam, or otherwise physically interfere with an unauthorized drone. Federal statutes and FAA authority over airspace limit counter-drone mitigation to a handful of federal agencies. States can detect the aircraft. They cannot stop it. The drones themselves have changed too: Anderson told Fox News that smuggling aircraft have evolved from carrying four-pound payloads at 45 miles per hour to 25-pound duffle bags at 75 miles per hour or more. A fishing quadcopter designed to drop hooks in a pond has become a logistical delivery system for weapons.

Russell Fox, president of Local 2951, Council 82, which represents corrections lieutenants in New York, put the human cost plainly in an interview with WAER. "Even if incarcerated-on-incarcerated violence occurs, staff still have to intervene." The knives in the March 14 drop raised the stakes for everyone inside the fence.

No arrests have been made in connection with the Marcy incident. Investigators have the drone; flight data from confiscated aircraft has led to arrests in other cases, according to Fox News. The gap between detection and action — between knowing what happened and knowing who did it — is where these cases often stall.

This is not a New York problem or a South Carolina problem. Washington State Prison in Georgia recorded a drone drop in November 2025, according to DroneXL. Canada formed a federal anti-drone task force combining Kingston Police, Correctional Service Canada, and the Canada Border Services Agency. Sgt. Jonas Bonham, head of the Kingston Police Intelligence Unit, estimates the coordinated effort cut drone drops roughly in half at four Kingston-area federal facilities over nine months — the rare counterexample where a dedicated federal-level response produced measurable results. The contrast with the U.S. trajectory is stark.

The XPECE One is still for sale. The demand for prison contraband is not going away. And the regulatory hole that makes a $2,299 fishing drone an effective smuggling platform remains unplugged.