Given recent fiscal issues and the continual struggle to reduce the nation’s overuse of incarceration, a renewed focus has been placed on the efforts of community corrections and alternative sanctions. This article concludes that criminal acts of escape must be reconsideredįor sentencing purposes in relation to their potential violence, risks, and intentions.

Implications of these findings and potential pathways for future escape research areĭiscussed. Understanding of the relationship between escapes and potential violence. Statutes neither concurred with the powder keg theory nor favored a more nuanced Results indicated that the majority of state state escape statutes to determine which states classify escapes in a mannerĬonsistent with the powder keg theory.

Nevertheless, federal defendants often receive unduly harsh sentencesīased on prior escape convictions because courts assume that the majority ofĮscapes are violent for purposes of sentencing enhancement. Takes place from minimum secure facilities and do not involve force at time of escape Violent and may explode into violence at any given time. 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.Escape research has debunked the powder keg theory that all escapes are inherently 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).

Try to escape prison