By Christopher Beam
A 24-year-old inmate reportedly “walked away” from a state prison in Shirley, Mass., Monday morning. On March 9, Texas prisoner David Puckett sawed through the bars of a recreation yard roof, jumped to the ground, scaled a fence topped with razor wire, and commandeered a pickup truck. (The keys were already inside.) Two prisoners escaped from a St. Louis detention center on Friday using the oldest trick in the book—a rope made of tied-together bed sheets.
Such reports make it seem as if escaping from prison is easier than ever. And yet the number of state prison escapes has declined steadily since the early 1990s, according to data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 1993, 14,305 prisoners of a state prison population of 780,357 escaped or went AWOL. By 1998, that number had been cut to 6,530. Escapes continued to decline in the 2000s, with only 2,512 escaped prisoners in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, even as the state prison population has risen to 1.4 million.
If escaping from prison is so hard these days, how do inmates do it? Same as always — though with an occasional high-tech twist. Here’s a rundown of the most common techniques.
Full Story: The Great Escapes