As the U.S. prison population has grown over the past few decades, experts say, prisons have gotten better at keeping those inside the walls from getting out.Escapes from maximum-security prisons, such as the upstate New York prison where two murderers escaped last week, are exceedingly rare, statistics show.In the five-year span between 2009 and 2013, just one inmate escaped from a maximum-security prison. Nine escaped from minimum- or medium-security facilities. 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 since 1983 the prison escape rate has dropped precipitously: 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 on to the prisoners."Nationwide, an estimated 1.6 million people were in state or federal prisons in 2013, the most recent year for which data is 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 cell blocks.In 2009, the federal government reported 2,845 inmates as "AWOL/escape." At the time, the overall prison population topped out at 1,615,487.In the New York escape last weekend, the two suspects evidently used power tools to drill precision holes through cell walls and pipes. The Clinton Correctional Facility, a 150-year-old state prison in Dannemora, N.Y., hadn't seen an escape from its maximum-security section since the Civil War, Horn noted."The staff comes to believe that nobody can escape," he said. When the idea that the prison is impregnable takes hold, he said, state becomes "complacent, and complacency leads to mistakes. And mistakes contribute to escapes."The prison's advanced age may have actually worked against it, since old facilities require more frequent updates. "As a result you're continually bringing in outside contractors," Horn said.While most prisons do a very good job keeping track of their tools, he said, "When you have multiple projects going on, as may be the case in an old prison, it becomes extremely difficult to keep track of tools."Kevin Tamez, managing partner for the MPM Group, a consulting firm near Philadelphia that does corrections work, said such lapses could become more common as the USA's prison system ages.Echoing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who said the pair "needed the assistance of someone" to escape, Tamez on Monday said the two escapees undoubtedly had outside help, possibly from a contractor."There is absolutely no way these two knuckleheads got out of there the way they did by themselves," he said. "They had to have been well-coached, well-informed and obviously well-supplied."He predicted an investigation into the breakout would reveal an understaffed prison and lax oversight of contractors. "The questions are going to be extremely embarrassing to answer," he said. "The ball was dropped a couple of places: Nobody heard anything, nobody saw a guy bringing a (power) saw into a cell."CUNY's Horn said prisons like Clinton face a dilemma, since they hold virtually no one but inmates serving life terms. Such prisoners "have nothing to lose from trying to escape," he said. "There's every incentive for them to try and try again — and try again.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
