iStockphoto / yhelfman / Grant Parish Sheriff's Office
The Grant Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana reported a truly bizarre crime this week. Two women from Texas were arrested for smuggling contraband into the United States Penitentiary, Pollock, a high-security federal prison.
Attempts to smuggle contraband into prison happen all the time and aren’t always newsworthy, but it is the manner in which these two women attempted to smuggle contraband that has brought this story national attention. They used fake plastic crows dropped from drones into the prison.
Women Arrested For Using Plastic Crows Dropped From Drones Into Louisiana Prison
On social media, the Grant Parish Sheriff’s Office announced the arrest with details of the story and included photographs of the two women from Texas who were arrested and one of the plastic ‘crows’ that was dropped from drones. Take a look:
Grant Parish Sheriff's Office
In that photograph, you can clearly see the fake plastic bird has black tape wrapped around it carrying some sort of a bundle. Laying on the ground is presumably one of the drones that was used to drop the plastic crows into the federal prison in Pollock, Louisiana.
The Grant Parish Sheriff’s Office announced the two women were caught “attempting to smuggle drugs, cell phones and tobacco into the Federal Prison, by using a drone to fly in plastic crow decoys that were filled with the contraband.”
Once arrested, the two women later confessed that they were paid $40,000 to smuggle the items into the prison. One 38-year-old woman from Joshua, Texas was arrested for “Possession of Methamphetamine with the Intent to Distribute, Possession of Marijuana with the Intent to Distribute and Taking Contraband into a Penal Institution.”
The second woman, a 41-year-old from Hurst, Texas, was arrested for “Possession of Synthetic Marijuana with intent to Distribute, Possession of Methamphetamine with intent to Distribute, Taking Contraband into a Penal Institution and an outstanding warrant.”
How common is contraband smuggling in prison?
A report from the United States Sentencing Commission used data from 2019-2023 looked at how common contraband smuggling is in America’s prison system as well as the most common types of contraband smuggled. What it found was 47.8% of all contraband smuggled into prison was cellphones followed by drugs (34.7%), and weapons (24.9%).
Of the drugs found, Buprenorphine (an opioid) was the most commonly found (47.6%), followed by marijuana, methamphetamine, opioids, cocaine, and fentanyl in that order. 53% of all contraband found was through prison guards physically searching an inmate’s body.
On average, inmates caught with contraband received an additional 11 months on their sentence. That full report can be read here.