![]() In addition, anyone caught after would face severe punishment. ![]() ![]() Why would they try to escape? It was notoriously difficult (soft sand, raised barracks, and seismic microphones to impede tunnelling) and any escapee would have a difficult time getting out of Germany. It seems a very large risk, especially given that they knew the Germans were losing the war. But Brickhill doesn't write about anyone starving, nor does he write of their captors commiting any atrocities. I am aware that they were indeed prisoners, and that the rations were less than ideal. ![]() The second most important factor was the ratio of the number of "treatment personnel" (like teachers, case workers, and psychologists) to the prison staff at large.I'm reading The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill, which recounts escape attempts from the Stalag Luft III POW camp in Poland during WWII.īrickhill describes a camp where he and his fellow RAF/AAC pilots were fed, had access to Red Cross packages, we're treated relatively decently by the Germans, and were given a fair degree of freedom (theatre, library, chapel, music, athletics). The researchers found that the aspect of a prison that correlated most strongly with escapes was the "youthfulness" (the average age) of the prison population as a whole. This last point, along with various other psychological evaluations, led the authors of this particular study to conclude, "Additionally, these findings suggested the issue of whether escape-prone prisoners were societally misplaced in a correctional institution when a mental health facility might have been more appropriate." They also ended the article with the caveat that their study only evaluated the very personal factors of these "escapees," and not the environmental or situational factors in the prisons where they were incarcerated that may have led up to their breaking out.Ī similar type of study, which focused on male prisoners in Georgia for the Criminal Justice Review in 1983, did look at factors within the prisons as well as within the lives and personalities of the felons who escaped. … Moreover, escapees were more likely than non-escapees to characterize themselves as impulsive, manipulative, and active." In the study, published in Criminal Justice and Behavior back in 1977, they found that the women who escaped (or tried to) "tended to be younger, tended to have longer sentences, and generally experienced more adjustment problems which resulted in juvenile imprisonment and/or psychiatric hospitalization than non-escapees. Iowa State University researchers compared the female felons in an Iowa prison who had escaped, and those who hadn't, from 1960 to 1974. ![]() But can anyone predict which prisoners will be most likely to attempt an escape? To prevent escapes, prison administrators can increase the facility's security, decrease the amount of unstructured time outside, staff up on guards, and maybe even try to manipulate prison architecture to discourage risky behavior among inmates. The methods may differ, but the motive, of course, is always the same. Then there was the guy in Montana who crawled into an air duct in an attempt to break out, but turned himself in when the prison was put on a noisy middle-of-the-night lockdown, "so the rest of these guys can get some sleep."Ĭhristopher Beam broke down the categories of frequent prison-escape methods a few years ago in a list for Slate: cutting holes in the roof, impersonating someone other than an inmate and walking out, brute force, getting help from the outside, and, yes, very slowly digging a tunnel from a cell (which he calls "The Shawshank-esque redemption"). And so a search of the news over the last month or so brings us accounts of the 30 teenagers who ran from a juvenile detention facility in Tennessee after crawling under a fence, the convicted high-school shooter and his friends who scaled the fence of an Ohio prison during "rec time," and the convicted killer whom cops spotted from a plane as he jumped onto a moving freight train after escaping from a prison in Texas (which he also escaped by scaling the fence). ![]()
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