Inmates increase, but breakouts don’t
Maximum-security prison escapes still rare, data show
As the U.S. prison population has grown over the past few decades, prisons have gotten better at keeping those inside the walls from getting out, experts say.
Escapes from maximum-security prisons, such as the Upstate New York prison where two convicted murderers escaped last week, are very rare, data show.
In the five-year span between 2009 and 2013, just one inmate escaped from a maximum-security prison in New York. Nine escaped from state minimum- or medium-security facilities in that period. Authorities recaptured all 10 within a day, state officials said.
Prison officials have far more trouble with inmate suicides and violence directed at prison staff, statistics show. In 2013 alone, New York prisons reported 161 suicide attempts and 645 assaults on staff members.
New York corrections officials found that the prison escape rate has dropped precipitously since 1983: The annual total of escapees dropped from 29 in 1983 to one in 2013, even as the state’s prison population grew 75% from 30,510 to 53,550.
“It’s very rare — this happens very infrequently, which is why it’s such a story,” said Martin Horn, a professor of corrections at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York.
When he attempted to study breakouts recently, he recalled, “There weren’t even enough incidents to study.”
U.S. prisons, he said, “may not do a great job on everything, but they do a pretty good job of holding onto the prisoners.”
An estimated 1.6 million people nationwide were in state or federal prisons in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available. An estimated 2,001 inmates were reported as “absent without leave (AWOL)/escape” in 2013 by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, but those totals also include inmates who disappeared in other ways such as work release, not just those who broke out of their cells.
In New York, the two escapees used power tools to drill holes through cell walls and pipes. The manhunt for the two entered a third day Monday with little indication capture was imminent.
“The staff comes to believe that nobody can escape,” he said, adding that the state consequently can become “complacent, and complacency leads to mistakes. And mistakes contribute to escapes.”