Walls and rules have never stopped prisoners from getting what they need. Drugs, phones and other contraband have been smuggled in by guards and visitors, flung over fences and even stashed inside hollowed-out pastries in care packages. Now, two men are accused of using an increasingly common technology to bypass prison walls: drones. Federal prosecutors in Fresno have charged Jose Enrique Oropeza and David Ramirez Jr. with using drones to drop loads of methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, tobacco and cellphones into the yards of seven prisons across California. Oropeza was arrested March 29; Ramirez on April 4. Along with drug trafficking offenses, the men face airspace violations of operating unregistered aircraft and flying without a certificate, a redacted indictment shows.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A Texas prison inmate serving time for robbery and burglary now faces federal charges in connection with using a drone to make prison yard drops to smuggle drugs and contraband into a correctional facility. Yeshmel James Wright, 35, of Dallas, is charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute synthetic marijuana. Other prohibited items he attempted to smuggle inside prisons include cell phones, authorities said.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A Texas man was arrested after allegedly flying a drone loaded with drugs, prepaid phones and mp3 players into a Fort Worth prison yard. Bryant LeRay Henderson, 42, was arrested at his home in Smithville, Texas and charged with one count of attempting to provide contraband in prison, one count of serving as an airman without an airman's certificate, and one count of possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance. "Contraband drone deliveries are quickly becoming the bane of prison officials' existence. Illicit goods pose a threat to guards and inmates alike – and when it comes to cell phones, the threat often extends outside prison walls. We are determined to stop this trend in its tracks," said U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham in a press release on Friday.

Even before the recent George Floyd case, there has been much debate about the extent to which claims of systemic racism are supported by statistical evidence. For example (Ross 2015) claims that unarmed blacks are 3.5 times more likely to be shot by police than unarmed whites when adjusting for relative differences in population size. However, (Fryer 2016) - formally published later as (Fryer 2019) - found that there was no such racial disparity when the data were conditioned on people being stopped by police, and there was a similar conclusion in (Patty and Hanson 2020) that was produced in direct response to public concerns about the Floyd case. In response to Fryer, (Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath 2018) argued that Fryer's analysis was compromised because it was essentially an example of Simpson's paradox (Simpson 1951; Bickel, Hammel, and O'Connell 1975; Fenton, Neil, and Constantinou 2019) whereby conclusions based on pooled statistics are reversed when drilling down into relevant subcategories. A new paper (Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo 2020) explains why Simpson's paradox is not the only statistical explanation for the apparently contradictory conclusions of Ross and Fryer.

We evaluate the folk wisdom that algorithms trained on data produced by biased human decision-makers necessarily reflect this bias. We consider a setting where training labels are only generated if a biased decision-maker takes a particular action, and so bias arises due to selection into the training data. In our baseline model, the more biased the decision-maker is toward a group, the more the algorithm favors that group. We refer to this phenomenon as "algorithmic affirmative action." We then clarify the conditions that give rise to algorithmic affirmative action. Whether a prediction algorithm reverses or inherits bias depends critically on how the decision-maker affects the training data as well as the label used in training. We illustrate our main theoretical results in a simulation study applied to the New York City Stop, Question and Frisk dataset.

Facial recognition and eye scanning have been deployed at prisons to prevent drug smuggling. The Ministry of Justice said the biometric scans for visitors were designed to help staff identify people bringing in contraband. At one prison, there were more "no shows" from visitors than usual after they learned the scans were being used. But prison campaigners said if families were deterred from visiting, then it would be "counter-productive". In the trials, facial recognition technology was used at HMP Humber; iris scanners at HMP Lindholme; and identity document verification at HMP Hull.

Cencetta Didiano, left, and her mother, Casandra Kerr, right, were arrested after they flew a drone full of contraband onto the roof of a prison where their relative was being housed, deputies said. A mother and daughter who police said were "hoping to spread some holiday cheer" were arrested and accused of flying a drone packed with contraband to a Florida state prison. Casandra Kerr, 40, and Cencetta Didiano, 22, of Tampa, allegedly flew their "special delivery" onto the roof of the Martin Correctional Institute in Indiantown, officials said. The pair were trying to deliver tobacco and cellphones to an inmate, who was Kerr's wife, and Didiano's father, the Martin County Sheriff's Office wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. Their plan was foiled when prison guards noticed the drone and alerted the sheriff's office.

A criminal gang used a swarm of drones to disarm and prevent law enforcement agents from carrying out a hostage rescue, an FBI official has revealed. A group of tiny drones amassed on the FBI agents outside an unidentified US city, making a series of'high-speed, low passes at agents in the observation post' in an attempt'to flush them' from their position, according to Defense One. 'We were then blind,' said Joe Mazel, head of the FBI's Operational Technology Law unit, at the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver. 'It definitely presented some challenges'. The disconcerting incident casts a light on the growing ways that criminals, hackers and others are using drones to carry out a number of illicit activities.

The Justice Department will soon start trying to jam cellphones smuggled into federal prisons and used for criminal activity, part of a broader safety initiative that is also focused on preventing drones from airdropping contraband to inmates. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told the American Correctional Association's conference in Orlando on Monday that, while the law prohibits cellphone use by federal inmates, the Bureau of Prisons confiscated 5,116 such phones in 2016, and preliminary numbers for 2017 indicate a 28 percent increase. "That is a major safety issue," he said in his speech. "Cellphones are used to run criminal enterprises, facilitate the commission of violent crimes and thwart law enforcement." When he was the U.S. attorney in Maryland, Rosenstein prosecuted an inmate who used a smuggled cellphone to order the murder of a witness.

Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz said video surveillance shows that inmates at Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility received two packages dropped by a drone May 29. Prison officials suspect the packages contained cellphones that were found inside the prison in July. The report, which was obtained by the Detroit News through a Freedom of Information Act request, said a third package containing phones, tobacco and marijuana was delivered that day, but prison officials recovered it. "A source inside the prison informed MDOC staff that it was the result of an unsuccessful drone delivery," according to the report by State Police Detective Sgt. "It was later learned that two packages were successfully delivered (confirmed through video) to prisoners via drone. After the successful drone delivery, two phones were found inside the facility on prisoners."