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How Often Do Prisoners Escape?

Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, Feb. 1, 2001, at 6:25 PM ET

Six escaped convicts from an Alabama prison were arrested Thursday in Tennessee. Last week, the last two of the "Texas Seven" fugitives surrendered in Colorado. How often do U.S. prisoners escape?

Not very. In 1998, the most recent year for which data are available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 6,530 people escaped or were AWOL from state prisons. That was a little more than one-half of 1 percent of the total population of 1,100,224 state prisoners.

And the numbers are declining. Fewer people have escaped from state prisons every year since 1994, and the percentage of prisoners escaping or going AWOL has fallen steadily, too. In 1993, 14,305 prisoners escaped out of a prison population of 780,357. That's almost 2 percent.

True, there are still thousands of escapees a year. Why aren't you hearing about them? The vast majority of escapees are "walk-aways" from community corrections facilities that have minimal supervision. Dramatic, Hollywood-style escapes from maximum security prisons are the ones that draw media attention.

Like their maximum security counterparts, the minimum security walk-aways are usually recovered. State prisons reported that more escapees and AWOL prisoners were returned than escaped every year from 1995 to 1998. The last year with more escapees than recaptured prisoners was 1994, when 14,307 prisoners escaped and 13,346 were returned.

Federal prison breakouts are rarer than state prison escapes. One federal prisoner escaped and was recaptured in 1999, out of a prison population of more than 115,000. He was the only one to escape in the past four years.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Jim Stephan, a statistician with the corrections unit of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Traci Billingsley, spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

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Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: OK, can we get this straight? It is perfectly reasonable to recapture more prisoners than escaped in any given year: Walldogg explains it below. An enormous number of Fray readers noticed this alleged mistake, though we did like this explanation: "that's why I don't visit prison, because you can be easily mistaken for a convict and they keep you". We also liked John Childs' "all escapes are not big deals"--witnessing a walkaway 40 years ago, he told the authorities, who said "He probably just wants to go see his wife. He'll be back tomorrow."

A number of convicts, corrections officers and even escaped convicts wrote in. Markus's company is making escape harder by developing a system that can detect tunnels. And we were expecting more posts making Glenn's point: "Why would anyone want to escape...they have it better than most people have it at home". On similar lines, we are waiting for a storm of protest from Iowans about the last post below...]


The mystery prisoners? They were lurking. Some of these idiots take time to get caught. The numbers are on an annual basis. Guy escapes in December his escape gets credited to that year. He gets captured in January, his return gets credited to the next year.

--Walldogg

(To reply, click here.)


I think you are being misled. There were plenty of escapes and walkaways from Federal Prisons in the last year. The Federal prison system is no less difficult to escape from than a state prison. They have the same work programs, gate passes, town drivers, camps and levels of security within the Federal system. What they do not have is the same level of accountability to the people that a state prison has. A Federal Prison Warden is a Feudal Lord, and has very little short term accountability to anyone.

Long term, like anyone else in our government, they are fully accountable. The problem is it takes a very big stink to bring enough attention to a problem.

In a three year term at a Federal prison in California, I saw 1 true escape, two walk away (one they couldn't call an escape because they gave him the keys to move a van and he kept going), 5 stabbings, 7 guards arrested or dismissed for drug sales or misconduct, a riot started by an associate warden punching an inmate, and so on. None of this was reported in the press until an international manhunt opened up for the escapee who fled to Mexico.

So I have doubts about the facts and statistics quoted in the article. Maybe it should be "statistics as reported" so people know the truth, or are left to suspect that the truth may be different than reported.

--Convict

(To reply, click here.)


Good article. I've always wondered though what does happen to a prisoner once he is recaptured. Does he get a lengthier jail time? Does it matter if he gets 30 years on top of the 120 he is due for already? It seems to me that if I was a prisoner with life in jail with no parole that I would try to escape all the time.

--John Rodrigues

(To reply, click here.)


[Steven Hays described here escaping from an Iowa prison. This was one reply:]

Escape? From an Iowa prison? What's the difference? Inside or out, Iowa is just one big prison anyway--in fact, there's probably more intellectual activity inside Iowa state prisons than outside. Years back a guy was offered parole from prison in Oregon under the condition he return to his home state of Iowa where he had to report to parole board etc. He refused the parole. The state then enforced the parole (due to prison overcrowding) and the guy sued the state to prevent his transfer. Never heard the ending--suicide maybe?

--Bon Temps

(To reply, click here.)

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