“Next Time It Could Be a Handgun”: How Fear Does the State’s Work for It

“Next time, it could be a handgun.”

The phrase appeared almost immediately after reports that a drone had delivered contraband into South Australia’s largest prison. It was not offered as evidence, but as a warning, a speculative future violence projected onto the present. A single sentence, doing an extraordinary amount of political work.

There is, of course, no evidence that firearms are being flown into Adelaide’s prisons by drone. None was presented. None was required. Because fear does something evidence cannot: it collapses scrutiny. Once fear is activated, proportionality disappears, escalation becomes inevitable, and punishment is justified in advance.

This is how law-and-order narratives operate. Not by responding to what has happened, but by invoking what might happen next.

Conveniently, that narrative omits crucial context. Drones have been delivering contraband into South Australian prisons for almost a decade. Between 2018 and 2021 alone, there were nine sightings of drones over or within prison perimeters. There is little doubt that many more drone drops have occurred without detection. 

Yet despite years of drone activity, not a single firearm has been found inside South Australian prisons.

Nor is the issue new to authorities. In 2017, then Minister for Corrective Services, Peter Malinauskas called for investigations into drone-detection technology to “ensure that if someone flies a drone into that airspace it gets detected, and to make sure they get caught accordingly.”

In 2021, Parliament inserted sections 87A and 87B into the South Australian Correctional Services Act that allowed penalties of up to two years imprisonment for operating a remotely piloted aircraft within 100 meters of a prison without permission, and granted prison authorities special powers to seize drones reasonably suspected of breaching restricted airspace.

The use of drones to smuggle contraband into prisons is not new. The manufactured hysteria surrounding this incident is the only new element. The response that followed was entirely predictable.

The reported incident at Yatala Labour Prison, a drone hovering outside a third-storey window, a concealed phone, drugs found during a cell search, was swiftly framed as a major security breach. Within hours, the conversation leapt from what was known to what could be imagined. The prisoner was reportedly moved to the “ultra-secure G Division.” Police investigations were launched. Officials reassured the public that new technologies with AI capability, and surveillance investments were already underway.

And looming over it all was the unspoken logic: if we don’t act now, something far worse is coming.

This is not new. It is a familiar script. We have seen it play out repeatedly in the wake of public crises: after acts of violence, after tragedies, after breaches of control. The state reaches for fear, and fear clears the path for force. Declared public precincts.Long-arm weapons in everyday spaces. Expanded police powers. More surveillance. More money. Less accountability.

What is striking is not how quickly this logic appears, but how rarely it is questioned.

The idea that “next time it could be a handgun” functions less as a safety assessment and more as a narrative device. It shifts the focus away from what actually occurred and toward a hypothetical worst-case scenario. In doing so, it renders critique irresponsible. Who would dare ask hard questions when a gun has been invoked? Who would talk about proportionality, or evidence, or structural causes, when the spectre of imminent violence is placed on the table?

Fear becomes a silencing tool.

The real, immediate consequences of this logic are not hypothetical at all. They are felt now. A person is transferred to harsher confinement. Surveillance intensifies. Punishment escalates. Budgets expand. Technologies proliferate. And all of it happens in the name of preventing a future that has not occurred.

Meanwhile, the system itself remains largely uninterrogated.

There is something deeply revealing about how this incident has been framed. The drone operator is hunted. The prisoner is punished. Police and corrections respond with speed and certainty. Yet there is almost no curiosity about why contraband economies exist so persistently within prisons in the first place, or why people inside risk severe punishment to access phones, drugs, or other prohibited items.

This is the displacement of accountability that defines carceral responses.Responsibility is always located in individual wrongdoing or external threat, never in the structure of the institution itself.

Mobile phones are treated as existential threats, despite the fact that prisons are systems built on enforced isolation. Communication with family, children, legal representatives, and support networks are heavily restricted. Calls are monitored, limited, expensive. Visits are curtailed. In that context, the desire for connection does not disappear, it is simply criminalised.

The same is true of drugs. Prisons do not eliminate addiction, trauma, or pain. They warehouse them. They concentrate them. They then express shock when substances circulate through underground channels.

To pretend that contraband economies are aberrations rather than structural outcomes is to misunderstand prisons entirely.

Prisons generate black markets by design. Total control always produces resistance. The more tightly a system grips, the more inventive people become in finding ways to breathe, connect, numb pain, or reclaim a fragment of autonomy. Breaches are not evidence that prisons are failing at their purpose; they are evidence of what that purpose actually is.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question: what if this incident is not a failure of prison security, but a predictable outcome of a system built on deprivation and force?

The response from authorities, however, offers no such reflection. Instead, it leans heavily on the language of reassurance. We are told about investments in high-tech scanners, AI-powered cameras, drone-jamming technology, new barriers. We are assured that staff acted quickly. We are reminded of penalties, two years here, ten years there.

This is security theatre: the performance of control in place of genuine safety.

Security theatre does not make systems safer; it makes them appear managed. It reassures the public that something is being done, without addressing why the same problems recur. It converts complex social realities into technical challenges to be solved with gadgets, fences, and force.

The arms race is endless. Drones prompt jammers. Jammers prompt countermeasures. Surveillance expands. Budgets grow. And still, prisons remain violent, unstable, and unsafe, for people inside and for staff alike.

What is secured through this process is not safety, but authority.

This logic mirrors what we are seeing well beyond prison walls. In public spaces, following acts of violence, we are told that heavily armed police are necessary to reassure us. That rifles in train stations and stadiums are the price of safety. That expanded powers must be accepted quickly, before the next imagined catastrophe arrives.

In each case, fear accelerates decision-making and narrows the political horizon. The question is never whether these measures actually work, or whom they harm, or what they normalise. The question is simply how fast they can be implemented.

And once implemented, they rarely recede.

The drone incident at Yatala has already begun to serve this function. It has become a vehicle for expanding surveillance, intensifying punishment, and justifying further militarisation, all while avoiding any meaningful conversation about why prisons continue to produce the very conditions they claim to suppress.

This is not an argument for ignoring risk or dismissing harm. It is an argument for refusing to let speculative fear dictate public policy. It is a call to distinguish between evidence and imagination, between safety and control.

“Next time it could be a handgun” is not analysis. It is a story. And like all stories, it does work. It rallies support, closes ranks, and clears space for power to move unchecked.

If we are serious about safety, inside prisons and beyond them, we need to resist the reflex to escalate at every breach. We need to ask harder questions about systems that rely on isolation, deprivation, and force, and then express surprise when people push back against them.

No amount of technology will resolve the contradictions at the heart of incarceration. You cannot surveil your way out of a system built on harm. You cannot punish your way to safety. And you cannot keep invoking imagined futures to avoid reckoning with the reality in front of us.

The danger is not what might happen next. The danger is what fear allows us to accept now.