New York prison break: a Hollywood fugitive fantasy unlike most escapes
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Version 0 of 1. A crime of patient toil, brazen mockery and elaborate planning has driven New York to two extremes: awe at the Hollywood audaciousness of an escape from prison and a desperation to stop two murderers from joining the ranks of America’s most notorious fugitives. Related: New York prison break - how two murderers escaped “If it was in a movie script you would have said it was overdone,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said of the escape by Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat 34, who broke out of the Clinton Correctional Facility by drilling through their walls and navigating through drains, finally emerging from a manhole outside the prison. Guards did not realize the shapes in Matt and Sweat’s beds were dummies until 5.30am Saturday. The convicts left a sticky note behind for guards: a smiley face above the words “Have a nice day!” The escape scheme immediately drew comparisons to the Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 film and 1982 Stephen King novella, which involves a prisoner’s escape via chisel, ruse and sewage pipe. Matt and Sweat’s escape has also been compared to a historical precedent: the 1962 escape from Alcatraz, in which three men crafted dummies to fool the guards, dug holes in their cells with spoons and set off the island on a makeshift raft, never to be seen or heard from again. The three inmates are presumed to have died in the frigid waters, unable to reach shore due to strong currents. “There’s an echo of Alcatraz,” said Keramet Reiter, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, “but the fact that we can sort of rattle off the two or three examples that we can remember speaks to how rare these escapes are.” “It’s absolutely an aberration when you look at the numbers,” Reiter said – especially at high-security prisons like Clinton. Twenty-two years ago, only 2% of the nation’s 780,000 inmates escaped. For what data exists, escapes now represent about 1% of the prison population, which has exploded in the past four decades – from about 300,000 people in 1978 to more than 1.5 million inmates in 2013. In 2013, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 2,001 incidents of prisoners escaping or going missing, among those with a sentence longer than one year. The media and the public ignores the overwhelming majority of these cases. It is only those rare cases that endure in the public’s collective memory – and which are often featured in movies. In 1971 Frank Abagnale tricked guards into believing he was a prison inspector; Leonardo DiCaprio played him in Catch Me If You Can. In 1934 bank robber John Dillinger escaped an “escape proof” in Indiana prison, saying he scared the guards with a gun whittled out of wood; Johnny Depp played him in Public Enemies. Clint Eastwood played one of the Alcatraz inmates in Escape from Alcatraz. The romanticization of escapees on film belies the reality of breakouts, which are often either grim or mundane. Many escapes often result in violence once the fugitive has been tracked down. Bomb-maker William Morales, a Puerto Rican nationalist who blew off his own hands accidentally but nonetheless scaled down a New York prison wall, was eventually tied to a murder in Mexico and served time there before being handed over to Cuba. The inmates of the “Texas Seven”, who accomplished the biggest prison break in the state’s history, murdered a police officer less than two weeks after they broke free in 2000. Most recorded escapes are more mundane, involving “walk-offs” by convicts who fail to show up to parole or halfway house programs, or who take advantage of transitions between facilities to stroll out the doors. In May, police finally tracked Frank Freshwaters, who had escaped from a prison “honor camp” in 1959, and proceeded to hide out in Florida for decades. Occasionally prisoners turn into escape savants, and show “unusual ingenuity and willpower”, Reiter said. Some inmates have used can openers and spoons to cut their way free, and Mark DeFriest, a Florida man who has escaped from various prisons seven times, once duplicated a key from memory alone. But extremely few escapes required tunneling through walls, rappelling down a fortress wall or deceiving hordes of guards. “Usually what you’re seeing is people walking off of very low security facilities, training jobs, they’re not crossing through barbed wire fences,” Reiter said. “Meanwhile the level of security in Clinton and high-security prisons are kind of unimaginable to the everyday person.” Technology and layers of reinforcement have made most high-security prisons incredibly difficult to escape, said Terry Pelz, a criminal justice professor at the University of Houston Downtown and a former Texas warden. Ubiquitous cameras, layers of wire fences sunk underground and basement-like cells allowed prison officials to “do more with less”. Pelz noted the rarity of escapes in New York, and singled out staffing issues as a likely problem. “I think in the New York case it was kind of a routine thing,” he said. “You get complacent sometimes when things are going well, and then you kind of drop your guard.” Cuomo also mentioned staffing on Monday, saying that the investigation would interview private contractors at the prison to see whether Matt and Sweat had help. Pelz said smuggled contraband, like the power tools used by the murderers or the cellphones that prisoners often use to coordinate with friends outside, could be linked back to a staffer. “It only takes a couple people to spoil the barrel,” he said. But Matt and Sweat “won’t be notorious unless they commit some kind of mayhem, and then it’ll rank up there”, he said. “But it’s a serious incident of murderers getting free, and something for the state to ponder and look at their procedures.” Both Reiter and Pelz suggested a cautious investigation. “There’s a real temptation to respond to this kind of thing by saying maybe they should’ve been in isolation,” Reiter said. “But to ramp up surveillance can be incredibly expensive, and it’s very hard to get escapes down to zero.” |