Crooks & Pals Getting Inventive In Sneaking Porn Into Prisons

MID-TROPHOSPHERE—Back in '84, when this author was spending a couple of months in Allenwood Federal Prison Camp, porn was pretty easy to get on the "inside." Copies of Playboy, Hustler and even Screw magazine were easy to find—and easy to trade with other inmates, though finding places to jack-off in peace were a bit more difficult. But times change, and several states—most notably California, Connecticut and Michigan—have banned the possession of all sexually explicit and even nude materials by inmates ... but that doesn't mean that the prisoners don't want porn, or that their frineds on the outside won't try to get it to them. Enter the drone. "The two men parked on a side street near the Maryland state prison with a car full of drugs, pornography and tobacco, authorities said," reported Lynh Bui and Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post. "They planned to load the items onto a green-and-white drone and send them soaring past the barbed wire and armed guards—and into the hands of an inmate." In fact, using drones to smuggle goods—most often drugs, including tobacco and pot, and sometimes cellphones—into prison appears to be an idea whose time has come. Within the past two years, people have been arrested for flying drug-laden drones over prisons in Ohio, South Carolina and Georgia—and those are just the ones who have been caught! According to Daniel B. Vasquez, head honcho at Corrections Consulting and Investigative Services (and a former prison official in California), drones could become a "major problem," "especially as the technology becomes cheaper and allows users to pilot the aircraft from farther away." "Very innovative," he assessed. "A drone, to me, makes a hell of a lot of sense." However, that might be a bit more difficult in California, with the state legislature just having passed a "drone control" bill which prohibits anyone from flying a drone to snap paparazzo-style photos of celebs, or to fly one at less than 350 feet over private property without the property owner's permission—though somehow, the more pressing problem of drones interfering with fire-fighting efforts seems to have fallen through the cracks. But drones aren't the only way to sneak porn into prison, as authorities in Norway are now finding out. Just last month, the Norwegian Directorate for Correctional Services has circulated a memo stating that prison officials can deny access to hardcore materials, which had been legal for all prisoners to possess, to any prisoner if in their estimation the material poses a "specific and high" threat to prison peace and security, and can limit the amount of porn any one inmate can possess. "As long as there is no specific legal basis for denial, we must accept access, even though we don't like it,"  said Knut Are Svenkerud, the leader of the Norwegian union for correctional workers, which has taken a stance against porn altogether. "Porn may become a commodity with illegal 'rental' between inmates. We also know that some inmates have had pornographic material that simulates rape of uniformed officers. We are there to do a job, but may end up in fantasies we would like to be left out of." But once again, technology saves the day—almost. "An inmate at Norway's Halden prison hacked the TV system so he could share pornographic films and secret messages with fellow prisoners," reported TheLocal.no website. Apparently, the TV system at the prison, which was opened in 2010 and is "focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment," is internet-based, and prison officials became suspicious when they saw a spike in usage across the system. "We reacted when we noticed unusually high data traffic and that inmates were having more than the normal trouble with their TVs," said  Jan Strømnes, a Halden prison official. "In addition, we found a handwritten note with a log-in on an inmate during a search." The hacker has been transferred to another prison, but Strømnes told Norway's VG newspaper that he "cannot guarantee that the TV system will not be hacked again." Pictured: The captured cache of drugs and porn a drone was to fly into a Maryland prison.