Night-time at Wandsworth Prison in South-West London and the walls are bathed in a soft, yellow light from security lamps. Above the distant hum of nearby traffic can be heard the whine of a rotor-powered drone.
It can be seen high up close to the roof, travelling along a prison block. Below it hangs a swaying black, plastic bag. At one point the drone suddenly drops, appearing to have lost direction. Then it climbs again, purposefully, as if searching for a specific target.
From one of the nearby windows, a prisoner pushes out a stick. Though it is hard to see, it seems to have a hook on the end.
The drone slows and appears to float in the air near the window as the prisoner tries to hook in the bag it is carrying. He succeeds; his hand grabs the bag, detaches it from the drone and he disappears with his loot into the window.
Another successful delivery.
The video of this clandestine operation lasts less than 30 seconds. But it provides clear evidence of the rising crimewave described last month as a ‘threat to national security’.
A drone hovers over a prison fence. The devices are being used to deliver contraband into jails
Drone deliveries of drugs, mobile phones, guns, knives and even takeaway meals are occurring weekly at Wandsworth, according to the local MP. But this is hardly unique.
The night silence at HMP Manchester, known as Strangeways, was regularly pierced by the angry hum of propeller-powered drones on at least 220 occasions in the past year – the highest figure recorded across all prisons in England and Wales.
Such is the scale of the problem that one inmate who recorded footage on an illegal mobile phone last year of a ‘drone drop’ said there were ‘more flights landing than Heathrow’.
Dotted along the seemingly impenetrable 30ft-high perimeter walls of HMP Manchester are signs declaring the area a ‘No Drone Zone’, with a red line striking through a silhouette of the airborne devices. ‘Unauthorised use of drones in this area is strictly prohibited.’
As darkness fell on the Victorian prison on the night I was there, the sky around its imposing 234 ft ventilation tower was still.
But the ‘no drone’ signs and threats of prosecution they bear do not serve as a deterrent. These are convicted or remanded criminals facing lengthy sentences, after all. One sign has even been defaced, its threats of prosecution rubbed out.
Drone drops to prisons have become big business. In the four years to 2023, the number of recorded drone incidents at prisons increased by 770 per cent, with more than 1,000 last year across the prisons estate, according to Ministry of Justice figures.
CCTV footage shows a drone carrying a package up to a window of HMP Wandsworth
Organised crime groups (OCGs) operating from within the prison walls can pay ‘gun-for-hire’ drone operators on the outside tens of thousands of pounds for deliveries with such ease it has been compared to ordering a package from Amazon.
Footage abounds online of drones – which are flown by remote control and can be purchased for anything from a few hundred pounds to tens of thousands – flying over prison walls with packages taped to them or hanging from string or rope. The operators can be hundreds of metres away, thanks to the range of the devices, using live footage from the drone’s camera to fly it into and around the prison.
In one recent video posted online and believed to have been filmed at HMP Manchester, a drone carrying its contraband on a long string is collected from a cell window as a prison officer shining a torch tries, in vain, to stop it.
A laughing inmate filming the drop on a mobile phone calls the guard a ‘f***ing plonker’.
Some drops are completed in as little as 20 seconds. Packages can weigh as much as 7 kg (1 st 7 lb). Sometimes the contraband is dropped into the prison grounds at a pre-arranged site, sometimes it is rolled in grass cuttings or AstroTurf to mix in with overgrown areas of the exercise yard or sports pitches.
At Long Lartin, a Category A prison in Worcestershire, packages have even been disguised as bags of excrement because prisoners unable to visit the toilet during the night have been throwing these out of their cell windows.
Prisoners who work as cleaners will retrieve the smuggled goods so they can be distributed among the population.
HMP Manchester, known as Strangeways, was subject to the angry hum of drones on at least 220 occasions in the past year
Last month, Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, released excoriating reports into both HMP Manchester and Long Lartin which led him to conclude that the Prison Service has ‘ceded the airspace above two high-security prisons to organised crime gangs’.
In an interview with the Mail, he went further, warning how drones could soon be delivering weapons or explosives to assist escapes and ultimately threaten the safety of the public.
Mr Taylor’s reports found that, at Manchester and Long Lartin prisons, rudimentary precautions to prevent drone drops were not working. Nets designed to stop the drones from landing were broken or not in place and CCTV cameras didn’t work.
In Manchester, four in ten prisoners were testing positive for drug use. At Long Lartin, more than 50 per cent of inmates said it was ‘easy’ to get drugs.
Windows being smashed by prisoners so they could grab contraband being flown in were replaced with Perspex at a cost of £5,000 each, Mr Taylor said.
Initially, prisoners threatened contractors fitting the windows, as well as their families. But soon the authorities learned that inmates could simply burn through the plastic.
Windows being smashed by prisoners so they could grab contraband being flown in were replaced with Perspex. Inmates began melting these windows to get through
‘If zombie knives [can] go over, then what else?’ Mr Taylor said. ‘Heaven forbid, something like explosives and prisoners attempt to escape and cause a big incident.’
Prison officers I approached at HMP Manchester said they had been told not to comment on the drone threat, although Mr Taylor said many officers at the prison were inexperienced and being ‘intimidated’ by inmates.
It is a tinderbox situation at the jail, which is just ten minutes’ walk from the city centre.
What is more, the institution is no stranger to controversy and internal violence.
Much of the prison was rebuilt following an infamous riot in 1990 during which photographs of prisoners sitting on its damaged roof made their way around the world.
Yet Mr Taylor found that conditions in the prison are still dangerously poor, including a ‘chronic’ rat infestation, broken cell windows and discarded clothing and rubbish around the exercise yard.
Even the pathways around the prison were littered with rubbish when the Mail visited.
‘Just doing the basics correctly in a prison, like cutting the grass and picking up rubbish, will actually make a difference,’ Mr Taylor added.
Last month’s damning report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons came despite years of warnings over the danger posed by drones delivering goods to prisons.
Between August and December 2020 one gang carried out more than 20 drone flights into HMP Risley in Warrington, Cheshire, delivering drugs valued up to £1.7 million.
On one occasion, a drone was captured on CCTV flying into the prison with a package suspended underneath, and then a prisoner used a broom handle to guide it into their cell. The drone left and reappeared just 20 minutes later with another package for the same prisoner.
Two of the seven involved in the flights who were jailed in 2023 were inmates at the prison.
A bag containing drugs and mobile phones is seized as it’s flown by drone into HMP Pentonville
In April last year, a husband and wife ‘gun for hire’ team were jailed for carrying out more than 100 drone drops into 11 prisons and young offender institutes. At least 72 of these took place at HMP Onley in Northamptonshire but the couple, Sajad Hashimi and Zerka Maranay, of Camden, north London, also masterminded drops into prisons from London to Edinburgh.
Northampton Crown Court heard that Maranay laundered almost £50,000 which her husband had been paid by prison gangs for piloting the drones and was also responsible for hiring cars that he drove to the various prisons.
The couple’s racket, which operated between August 2022 and October 2023, was only toppled when a DJI Phantom 4 drone crashed within the grounds of HMP Highpoint in Suffolk. Fishing line and hooks were attached to the drone along with a package which contained heroin, steroids, phone chargers, tobacco, SIM cards and mobile phones, with a combined prison value of up to £19,500.
After examining the drone, police found it had been responsible for 62 flights across seven different prisons.
In July last year, a mother-of-five was jailed for playing a ‘pivotal role’ in a gang that dropped more than £1 million of drugs into prisons.
Lucy Adcock, 47, was caught with a drone in the boot of her car near HMP Parc in Bridgend, Wales, and investigators were able to establish it had been used in 22 prison drops. Adcock was said to have travelled the country from her home in London to fly the drones or instruct others in how to do so. She cried as she was jailed for six years.
The last time guns or other weapons were used to escape from prison was during an infamous incident at HMP Whitemoor, Cambridgeshire, in 1994.
A ‘no drone zone’ sign hangs on the outer wall of HMP Manchester
Five IRA inmates and a man previously involved in an armed prison escape used two smuggled 9mm pistols during their escape over the prison’s walls. Officers later discovered more than 1kg of the explosive Semtex which had also been smuggled in.
There are now real fears of such an escape happening again – this time courtesy of drones. Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who wrote a 2016 government report on Islamic extremism in jails, said: ‘The scandalous security lapses in two of our most important high-security prisons reveals a much bigger malaise in the prison service.
‘This time it’s competence not overcrowding. The Chief Inspector of Prisons could not have been clearer: in both prisons basic anti-drone precautions were either completely absent or broken.
‘Nets and CCTV cameras were not fit for purpose. That foreseeable failure surrendered the skies above some of our most sensitive prisons to organised crime.
‘If drone payloads can bring drugs and mobile phones almost on demand to cell windows, what is to stop the same deliveries to terrorists held there and in other jails this time with firearms and explosives?’
A drone carrying a bag of drugs is seized by West Midlands Police on its way to a prison
There is now a growing industry in the fight against illegal drone operation. Jon Hill works for security firm Genetec, and part of his brief involves protecting major international airports from illegal drone incursions.
He told how radar technology has been used to detect drones, as well as ‘jamming’ technology, which involves implementing an electronic forcefield around a perimeter such as a prison that jams a drone’s signal and forces it to fall to the ground.
The latter technology is currently being used at Guernsey’s Les Nicolles Prison.
Mr Hill said that the preventative measures that are lacking are largely down to cost reasons.
‘There are so many other challenges in the prison sector, so what do you spend the money on?’ he said.
Chillingly, Mr Hill also warned that a new generation of drones could be on their way. These use a fibre-optic cable connected to the vehicle stretching to hundreds and hundreds of metres from its controls so its signal cannot be jammed. These are military-grade and have been used by both Russia and Ukraine in their war.
Mark Fairhurst, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, the trade union for prison officers, told the Mail that staff have been raising the drone issue to Prison Service leaders for at least five years. ‘The threat is real and imminent and is not going to end well if you don’t tackle it,’ he said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: ‘This Government inherited prisons in crisis – overcrowded, with drugs and violence rife.
‘We are gripping the situation by investing in prison maintenance and security, working with the police and others to tackle serious organised crime, and building more prison places to lock up dangerous criminals.’
