Prison escape

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U.S. Marshals observing a prisoner transport to prevent escapes
Escape from prison via helicopter is seen as a major threat. Many prisons have some type of enclosed roof, as shown at the Jika Jika Division, Pentridge Prison, Melbourne, Australia.

A prison escape or prison break is the act of an inmate leaving prison through unofficial or illegal ways. Normally, when this occurs, an effort is made on the part of authorities to recapture them and return them to their original detainers. Escaping from prison is also a criminal offense in many places, and it is highly likely to result in time being added to the inmate's sentence, as well as the inmate being placed under increased security.

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[edit] Punishment

In some jurisdictions, such as most U.S. states, escape from jail or prison is a criminal offense. In Virginia, for instance, the punishment for escape depends on whether the offender escaped by using force or violence or setting fire to the jail, and the seriousness of the offense for which they were imprisoned.[1][2][3] In other jurisdictions, the philosophy of the law holds that it is human nature to want to escape. In Mexico, for instance, escapees who do not break any other laws are not charged for anything and no extra time is added to their sentence;[4] however, officers are allowed to shoot prisoners attempting to escape.[5] In Mexico, an escape is illegal if violence is used against prison personnel or property or if prison inmates or officials aid the escape.[6]

[edit] Famous historical escapes

There have been many famous escapes throughout history:

[edit] 17th century

  • In 1621 Dutch author Hugo Grotius escaped from Loevestein where he was held captive by hiding himself inside a book coffin. He was then smuggled outside.

[edit] 18th century

  • Jack Sheppard took to theft and burglary in 1723, and was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escaped four times, making him a notorious public figure and wildly popular with the poorer classes.
  • The Italian author and adventurer Giacomo Casanova escaped from prison in 1757.

[edit] 19th century

  • Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from his prison on the island Elba in 1815 and returned to Europe in an attempt to restore his Empire.
  • The notorious outlaw Billy The Kid managed to escape from prison in 1881, but was captured and shot by Pat Garrett only a few months later.

[edit] 1900-1950

  • John Dillinger served time at the Indiana State Penitentiary at Michigan City, until 1933, when he was paroled. Within four months, he was back in jail in Lima, Ohio, but his gang sprang him, killing the jailer, Sheriff Jessie Sarber. Most of the gang was captured again by the end of the year in Tucson, Arizona, due to a fire at the Historic Hotel Congress. Dillinger alone was sent to the Lake County jail in Crown Point, Indiana. He was to face trial for the suspected killing of police officer William O'Malley during a bank shootout in East Chicago, Indiana, some time after his escape from jail. During this time on trial, a famous photograph was taken of Dillinger putting his arm on prosecutor Robert Estill's shoulder when suggested to him by reporters.
  • On March 3, 1934, Dillinger escaped from the "escape-proof" (as it was dubbed by local authorities at the time) Crown Point, Indiana county jail, which was guarded by many police officers and national guardsmen. Newspapers reported that Dillinger had escaped using a fake gun made from wood blackened with shoe polish.
  • Japanese murderer Yoshie Shiratori broke out of prison four times between 1930s and 1940s. A novel and TV-drama Hagoku was based on his true story.
  • The Fort San Cristóbal is a fort located on the top of the mount San Cristóbal, which is very close (4 km) to Pamplona, Spain. Built inside the mountain and obsolete since its opening in 1919, due to its weakness against aviation, it served as a prison. On May 22, 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, around 30 prisoners organised a mutiny for a massive prison break. 792 prisoners fled away but only 3 succeeded in getting to the French border; 585 were arrested, 211 died and 14 of the arrested who were considered the leaders were sentenced to death. Most fugitives were intercepted during the following days. In 1988, a sculpture was erected to honour the memory of the Republican people dead there. The fort ceased to be prison in 1945.
  • Colditz Castle was used as an 'escape-proof' prisoner of war camp during World War II; but over the course of 300 escape attempts, 130 prisoners escaped.[citation needed] Thirty escapees eventually managed to reach friendly territory. The men had tunneled, disguised themselves as guards, workmen or women, sneaked away through sewer drains, and even planned to use a glider to get over the wall.
  • In the Cowra breakout, at least 545 out of approximately 1000 Japanese Prisoners of War escaped from Number 12 Prisoner of War Compound at Cowra on the night of 4 August 1944, of those 231 commit suicide and 108 are wounded.

[edit] 1950-1975

  • Accused safe cracker Alfie Hinds tried to proclaim his innocence by repeatedly walking out of prison. He became famous for escaping from Nottingham Prison after sneaking through the locked doors and over a 20-foot (6.1 m) prison wall, for which he became known as "Houdini" Hinds. He later escaped from the Law Courts at the Old Bailey. Escorted by two guards, he went to the lavatory, where they removed his handcuffs outside. As the three entered, Hinds locked the two guards inside the lavatory by snapping a padlock, which had been smuggled in to him earlier, onto screw eyes inserted on the door by his unknown accomplices and escaped into the crowd on Fleet Street. Hinds sealed his notoriety by making a third escape from Chelmsford Prison.

In the 1960s, Robert Hughes attempted to break his brother, Donald, out of prison. He was unsuccessful and received 10 years of house arrest and 5 more years of parole.

One of the false ventilator grilles that the Anglin Brothers and Frank Morris used to conceal holes they drilled in their cells. It is shown here with the board from which it was cut. The escapees climbed through the tunnel hole into the utility corridors behind their cells. From there, they climbed up to the roof of the cellhouse. Canvas board, soap, paint, metal. L 25, W 16, H 9 cm Golden Gate National Recreation Area, GOGA 356
Side view of dummy head found in Frank Morris’ cell.

[edit] 1975-2000

  • Midnight Express author Billy Hayes escaped from a Turkish prison island where he was serving a 30 year sentence for hashish smuggling, using a fishing boat to make his way to Greece and eventually home to New York City, in 1975.
  • Serial killer Ted Bundy escaped from prison twice in 1977.
  • In December 1979, political prisoners Tim Jenkin, Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris escaped from South Africa's maximum-security Pretoria Prison. After 18 months of plotting, testing, preparing, and learning how to pick locks and forge keys, the trio escaped the prison the same way they came in: through 10 locked doors.
  • In 1984, six death row inmates escaped Mecklenburg Correctional Center, making it the largest mass death row escape in American history. All were recaptured within 18 days, and all six men would eventually be executed. The final execution took place in 1996.
  • In August 1996, Englishman David McMillan escaped from Thailand’s Klong Prem Central Prison while awaiting trial on drug charges. McMillan cut the bars of his shared cell, scaled four walls before dropping over the electrified outer wall using a bamboo ladder. The break-out is described in his book Escape (published 2007).
  • In 1998, the Belgian child molester Marc Dutroux notoriously managed to escape for a few hours. He was caught the same afternoon, but the incident forced two politicians to resign and deepened the loss of faith in the Belgian judicial system. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/88889.stm)
  • In 1999, Leslie Dale Martin and three other inmates on Louisiana's death row escaped from their cells at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. They were caught within hours before they even managed to escape prison grounds. The four men had managed the escape with the use of hacksaws that had been smuggled in for them by a bribed corrections officer. Other corrections officers were inattentive to the inmates' two to three week effort at cutting their cell doors and window. After the escape, two corrections officers were fired and two others were demoted. Martin was later overheard by two corrections officers plotting another escape, which included taking hostages and commandeering a vehicle to ram the prison's front gates. Martin was immediately moved to the holding cell outside the Death Chamber, a month before his execution in 2002.
  • In March 1999, Lucy Dudko hijacked a helicopter during a joy-flight over Sydney and ordered the pilot to land inside Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre in Silverwater, New South Wales where her lover, John Killick, was serving 28 years for armed robberies. The helicopter plucked Killick from the prison's exercise yard and avoided a shower of bullets fired by prison guards. The couple then went on the run, eluding police around the country until their luck ran out in a Sydney caravan park six weeks later.
  • Ty Conn's escape on May 6, 1999 from inside Kingston Penitentiary was the 26th in the history of facility. Conn employed a ladder and homemade grappling hook to scale the wall and used cayenne pepper to deter dogs following his scent.

[edit] 2000-Present

  • The Texas 7 escaped from John B. Connally Unit on December 13, 2000. Six of them were captured after over a month and a half on the run; the 7th killed himself before being captured.
  • In January 2001, 3 inmates escaped from Oklahoma State Penitentiary's H-Unit (Hi-Max). One of them was injured during the escape, and while trying to get back in the prison he got caught in the razor between the fences. The other 2 offenders (one serving a life sentence for murder, the other for rape and kidnapping) were at large for several days before being apprehended in a small town approximately 40 miles (64 km) from the prison.
  • In New York, two convicted murderers escaped from Elmira State Penitentiary in July 2003, both recaptured in 2 days.
  • Hugo Selenski was the target of a nationwide manhunt and gained national media recognition in USA when he escaped from the jail where he was awaiting trial the week he was charged with murders, on Friday, October 9, 2003. He and another inmate used bedsheets to escape from the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in the county seat of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Selenski's partner in the jailbreak, Scott Bolton, was injured and hospitalized during the escape, but Selenski remained free. He turned himself in several days later.
  • Brian Nichols on March 11, 2005 escaped from the Fulton County courthouse in Atlanta, by overpowering an officer and taking her pistol. He then murdered a judge, a court reporter, a police officer and U.S. Customs agent. He then held a woman named Ashley Smith hostage for a night in her own home, before he allowed her to leave to visit her daughter. Once she was released, she called the police, and he surrendered peacefully to SWAT officers who arrived on the scene.
  • On November 4, 2005, Texas Death Row Inmate Charles Victor Thompson escaped from the Harris County Jail by acquiring a set of street clothes and pretending to be a representative from the State Attorney General's office to fool the corrections officers. He was recaptured two days later in Shreveport, Louisiana, 200 miles (320 km) from where he escaped.
  • Ralph "Bucky" Phillips escaped from prison on April 2, 2006, in New York, by cutting through the ceiling in the kitchen with a can opener. On June 10 he was suspected of a shooting which ended with one New York state trooper being severely wounded. Bucky was later caught in Warren County, Pennsylvania, on September 8, 2006, his escape led police on the largest manhunt in New York state history. He was sentenced to life without parole for the shooting death of SWAT officer Longobardo and 40 years to life in both other shootings, which injured one state trooper and one other SWAT officer.
  • Richard Lee McNair has escaped from custody three times, including from a federal maximum-security prison in April 2006. He was recaptured by the RCMP on October 25, 2007 in Campbellton, New Brunswick, when he was stopped while driving a stolen vehicle.
  • John Parsons (who murdered a Chillicothe, Ohio Police Officer while running away from the police for robbing a gas station) escaped from a jail in Ross County, Ohio on July 29, 2006 using bedsheets, toilet paper, and newspaper. He was later recaptured on October 19, 2006 .As a fugitive, Parsons was twice featured on the Fox television show America's Most Wanted.
  • On December 15, 2007 inmates Jose Espinosa and Otis Blunt escaped from the high-security level of the Union County jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Espinosa was awaiting sentencing on an aggravated manslaughter charge, while Blunt was being held in lieu of bond on robbery and weapons charges. They escaped by scraping away the mortar around the cinder blocks making up the cell walls. They then smashed the block, hid the pieces in a footlocker and covered the holes with pin-up pictures. To delay knowledge of the escape, they made dummies out of sheets and pillowcases and left them in their beds. Espinosa was recaptured on Tuesday, January 8, 2008. Blunt was recaptured the following day Wednesday, January 9, 2008 in Mexico City, Mexico.
  • Mas Selamat escaped from the Singapore's Whitley Road Detention Centre at 4:05 pm on Wednesday, February 27, 2008. He was eventually recaptured in Johor Bahru, Malaysia on April 1, 2009, over a year after his escape.
  • Three inmates at an Arizona State Prison for-profit Management and Training Corporation operated facility on July 30, 2010. Two, Daniel Renwick and Tracy Province were murderers and John McCluskey had been convicted of attempted murders. Renwick was captured in a shootout in Rifle, Colorado on August 1, 2010. Though he still had 32 years on his sentence in Arizona, he was sentenced to 60 years to be served in Colorado. Province, already a lifer, was captured on August 9, 2010 in Meeteese, Wyoming.[11] After being sentenced to 38 1/3 years, he was quickly extradited to face murder charges in New Mexico. McCluskey, who had been doing consecutive 15-year sentences, was captured with Casslyn Welch, his cousin/accomplice in eastern Arizona on August 19 in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. He was sentenced to 43 years in an Arizona prison on escape, kidnap, hijacking and robbery charges. [12] Like Province, Welch and McCluskey were soon extradited for the alleged robbery, hijack and murder of two vacationers in New Mexico. The U.S. Attorney in New Mexico had filed death penalty charges against all three.
  • Jose Luis Gonzales Franco escapes from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California on January 9, 2012. Franco, who was locked up on burglary charges, was wearing blue jail pants and a brown T-shirt when he somehow escaped over a jail wall. Franco was found riding a bike in Dublin not far from the jail about 7 hours after the escape and returned to custody.

[edit] Escapes in popular culture

See also: Prison film and Prison literature

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] Fiction

  • Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a novella by Stephen King which revolves around a prison escape, and was made famous by the subsequent film The Shawshank Redemption featuring actors such as Morgan Freeman. The film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo depicts protagonist Edmond Dantès's falsified arrest and internment, years of isolation and finally recruitment into an escape from prison to exact revenge on his captors.
  • The TV series Prison Break revolves around a complicated escape plan and the subsequent nationwide manhunt. A second escape from a prison in Panama and the subsequent (though brief) manhunt are featured at the end of the series' third season.
  • In the video game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Sam Fisher escapes prison with JBA member Jamie Washington.
  • In Oz inmates Miguel Alvarez and Agamemnon Busmalis escape from the prison. Eventually both are apprehended by authorities.
  • In the 1953 movie Stalag 17, attempts to escape the prison fail because of a spy.
  • In the movie The Fugitive, as with the television series on which it was based, Dr. Richard Kimble is mistakenly accused of his wife's murder. He escapes along with another inmate when their transport crashes.
  • The movie U.S. Marshals (a spin-off of The Fugitive movie featuring Tommy Lee Jones' U.S. Marshal character) revolves around a prison escapee and his mistaken conviction of his crime.
  • The Harry Potter novel The Prisoner of Azkaban depicts the manhunt of a wizard who escaped the magical community's version of Alcatraz (Azkaban).
  • In the video game Sly 2: Band of Thieves the player has break out his fellow captive team members.
  • In Saints Row 2, the player escapes from prison with a fellow inmate named Carlos in the beginning of the game.
  • In Dead to Rights, the player is sent to prison after being framed for murder. After a lot of work an escape plan is developed that includes escaping from the electric chair as its used on you and as a bonus, killing the sadistic guard that was to perform the execution by putting him in the electric chair after you escape from it. The player then escapes through sewer tunnels and an old mine shaft. In a later chapter where the player returns to the prison (now shut down due to the escape and severe damage from riots that followed), the escape is referred to as being "now legendary." An interesting note is that during the attempted execution, two of the game's main villains are there to see the execution (one of which was responsible for the character being framed and sent there) and there's a third that presumably represents the third major villain as he's seen later working for him.
  • In Con Air, the inmates on the plane attempted to escape in an attempt planned by Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich).
  • Riddick, a fictional character portrayed by Vin Diesel, is notorious for his ability to escape from seemingly any detention facility including those with extreme security measures such as hostile environments or even cryopreservation.
  • In both the novel and the film The Silence of the Lambs, serial killer Hannibal Lecter escapes from his specially designed maximum security cell in Memphis, Tennessee by killing his two guards and using the face of one of them to fool the ambulance crew. He later murders the ambulance crew and a tourist and flees Memphis.
  • In Cool Hand Luke, Luke becomes notorious for his repeated attempts to escape prison.
  • In the British soap opera Coronation Street, murderer Tony Gordon was broken out of prison by his ex-cellmate Robbie in order to get revenge on people who he believes caused him to be sent down.
  • The Next Three Days
  • In the videogame Call of Duty: Black Ops, the player escapes from the Russian prison Vorkuta in the second mission.

[edit] See also

Lists:

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ § 18.2-477. Prisoner escaping from jail; how punished.
  2. ^ § 18.2-479. Escape without force or violence or setting fire to jail.
  3. ^ § 18.2-480. Escape, etc., by setting fire to jail.
  4. ^ Mexico Prison Conditions.
  5. ^ Mexican Jailbirds Get to Fly for Free, Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, November 15, 2002.
  6. ^ More on the Kaplan Caper, Time Magazine, Sep. 20, 1971.
  7. ^ "3 inmates escape Michigan City prison" WISH-TV Retrieved on 2009-07-23
  8. ^ "One Henry County killer caught near Chicago mayors home" The Star Press Retrieved on 2009-07-23
  9. ^ "2nd of 3 Ind. prison escapees captured" WIVB Retrieved on 2009-07-23
  10. ^ "Last of three prison escapees captured in Indiana" CNN
  11. ^ "First Inmate Sentenced in Arizona Prison Escape". http://www.lvrj.com/news/first-inmate-charged-in-arizona-prison-escape-114812684.html. Retrieved 31 July 2011. 
  12. ^ "Arizona inmate gets 43 years for his escape". http://www.lvrj.com/news/arizona-inmate-gets-43-years-in-prison-after-escape-124114574.html. Retrieved 19 June 2011. 

[edit] References

  • Dowswell, Paul (1994). Tales of Real Escape. London, England: Usborne Publishing Ltd. ISBN 0-7460-1669-7. 
  • McMillan, David (2007). Escape. Singapore: Monsoon Books. ISBN 9789810575687. 

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