The year is 2015 and Mexican crime kingpin Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is making his way through a
tunnel that stretches from his shower stall at Federal Social Readaptation Center No.1 maximum
security prison to a construction site not far away. This may have been the most brazen, and most
costly, prison escape of all time. Sure, in 1962, three men may have successfully escaped Alcatraz
Federal Penitentiary, but did they really survive the cold water and live a full and fruitful life
on the outside? The jury is still out on that one. As for El Chapo, his freedom didn’t last long and
right now he has less chance of breaching his new prison walls than gold bullion stands a chance of
walking out of Fort Knox. Maximum security is no joke, and today you’ll find out why.
Before we talk about the impossible, meaning escaping from the most secure
facilities out there, let’s have a look at some examples of when prisoners managed
to escape – if only for a short time. One of the most feared prisons in the U.S.
is Louisiana State Penitentiary, a place that has at times been called the “Alcatraz
of the South.” It has a reputation of being a brutal place to do your time
and it is not an easy place to escape from. So, you might wonder how in 1999 death row
prisoner Leslie Dale Martin and three other men managed to leave the prison and taste freedom.
When you are locked down 23 hours a day and under the strictest supervision, there aren’t too many
options open to you. In many prisons even when you are allowed out of your cell, your fresh air time
is just another cage, albeit a large cage. So, what to do?
The answer for these men was to bribe prison guards. If a guard’s wage doesn’t
quite pay the bills maybe some of them can be enticed with a bribe?
That’s exactly what the men did. They paid at least one guard to bring hacksaws into the prison.
For weeks the prisoners slowly sawed through the bars on the cell doors and windows,
a procedure that might sound a little bit clichéd in the prison escape canon, but hey, evidently it
can work. It seems they might have also paid a guard to turn a blind eye to their sawing.
The men got out over the prison walls and made a run for it, but the alarm was soon raised and
a chase team with bloodhounds went after them. They were all soon caught. In the aftermath,
two corrections officers were fired and two were demoted.
We should say that Martin planned another escape after that,
but this time it involved taking hostages. If you can bribe an officer, or better,
a few officers, that could be your best chance of escaping from a maximum-security prison. But what
about taking hostages, could that work? Well, we don’t need to go any further
from Louisiana State Penitentiary to answer that. We don’t even need to change the year.
Not long before Martin made his short-lived escape, four convicted murderers got out.
It looks like they too had managed to bribe a guard,
because it was revealed that guns had been smuggled into the prison
and hidden inside a box in a wall. The prisoners retrieved those guns and with them
they took a maintenance supervisor hostage. This was a predicament for other officers inside
the prison. There isn’t much you can do when a gun is being held at an innocent man’s head.
In this case, the prisoners walked out of the prison with their hostage at their side.
They then drove him to some nearby woods, tied him up, and ran for it. Simple, but effective.
It didn’t take long for the authorities to catch up with them. Two men were caught soon
after they fled into the woods and two others were re-arrested around five hours later.
One man who was cornered put a gun to his own head as he really didn’t want to go to prison again.
So, as you’ve heard, escaping a maximum-security prison has been done using fairly old-school
methods. Notably, bribing and hostage taking. There have been much more elaborate escapes,
ones that didn’t require the cash and connections that El Chapo had.
Take for instance the Texas 7. They escaped in 2000 from the John B. Connally Unit,
a maximum-security state prison in the state of Texas.
Their escape involved overpowering nine civilian maintenance supervisors and
four correctional officers, as well as other inmates. Once they had those guys restrained,
they removed their clothes and changed into them. They then left their victims gagged and tied up.
With some guys in civilian clothes and some guys in officer’s uniforms they started pretending to
be other people working in the prison, and they were good at it. They not only managed to get
out of the prison, but they also took lots of guns from an armory. They stole a maintenance
pick-up truck and there was also a getaway car waiting for them outside the prison gates.
Like the Alcatraz escape that may or may not have been successful, in the escape canon we
can call this one ‘elaborate’. It took lots of planning. The men had to know where the guards
were at all times. They even had to pick the right guards to overpower and steal clothes from.
They basically had to plan the escape like someone might plan a very lucrative heist.
Another escape has been compared to that of the Texas 7. This was back in the 70s and it
also involved a group of men, this time six men. Their escape from the maximum-security
facility Mecklenburg Correctional Center has been called “the boldest
and most elaborate escapes in U.S. history.” It certainly falls into the ‘elaborate’ category
of escapes and if it weren’t for the fact those men were vicious killers, you might even call
their escape funny. On the fateful day when they got out of the supposedly “escape-proof” prison,
they overpowered their guards after much careful study. They too had spent months
watching the guards and had even sized them up so they knew which guards’ uniforms would fit them.
This time the guys got dressed up in riot gear, too, including riot helmets.
At this point they had the guards tied up, leaving them fearing for their lives.
One of the guards many years later said, “I had just had a baby. She was all I could think about,
dying and not seeing my daughter anymore.” They told the guards, keep your mouth shut,
and you won’t get hurt. Meanwhile, they had taken a gurney and placed a TV in the middle of it.
They then threw a blanket over the TV and radioed to other officers, telling
them that the thing they had was a bomb. Confused offers didn’t know they were
communicating with inmates so when they were asked to open doors, they opened them.
What they then saw was two men carrying the bomb (TV) and two other men spraying it
with fire extinguishers. Yep, it might sound like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon,
but it worked. The prisoners took the fake bomb out of the prison and they drove away with it.
A nationwide manhunt ensued and not surprisingly, the prisoners were all found in the end.
Those are good examples of an elaborate escape. They took plenty of planning and
it has to be said, quite a lot of ambition. In the last case the prison was left with egg
on its face, so soon it changed things. One of those things was to lock the men up more,
basically keep them confined to their cells, at least if they were on death
row. Other changes that happened was hiring extra staff and also installing more cameras.
You might now be wondering if there is any maximum-security prison that is just
impossible to escape from. Imagine if a person has escaped before, maybe even numerous times before.
What do you do with them? Dig a hole in the floor and throw them in? Not quite, this isn’t 1520,
it’s 2020, prisoners have to have some rights. As for someone they just couldn’t keep held down,
we think the best example is a man named Richard Lee McNair. He escaped prison three times and
one of those escapes, we kid you not, involved mailing himself out of prison. This man was very
intelligent, and he made a career out of escaping from prison. He also once bluffed a cop during an
escape that has gone down in history as one of the most shameless lies ever caught on camera.
So, where do you put a man that can seemingly outfox the authorities when he wants and get out
of prison with as much ease as Houdini removed a pair of handcuffs? The answer to the question is
ADX Florence, the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, aka, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
This place has been called “extreme” in terms of just how secure it is. Journalists have walked
through its halls and said they were spooked out. The reason for that is because the place
is just so quiet. You can hear a pin drop in there. It looks less like a prison and more
like a facility at the fictional SCP Foundation. It sits 5,000 feet above sea level at the foot of
Colorado’s southern Rockies. What does that tell you? It tells that even if you could somehow get
over the walls or dig under the ground, you’d stand out like a white rabbit running through
the desert. There is literally nowhere to run. This is where McNair is now housed. It’s where
El Chapo spends all his time. It’s where many of the most dangerous prisoners in the USA live,
and the ones that showed just a bit too much aptitude in prison escape class.
A prisoner here will be housed according to their security level. It’s all high security,
but when you hold the likes of El Chapo, well, you can’t be too careful. All prisoners
will be on permanent lockdown, meaning 23 hours a day in a cell that is soundproof.
That’s so prisoners cannot chat with each other. In each cell there isn’t really anything you could
fashion tools out of. The spartan cells come with a bed, a stool, and a desk, all made out of poured
concrete. There is a sink that doesn’t have a tap that could be pulled off and a shower that can’t
be used to flood the cell. That means no dragging officers there in the night, getting them in the
cell and hitting them with a tool a prisoner has made. Not gonna happen. There is a TV,
but that is bolted inside the wall. Just for added torture, it plays mostly religious shows.
We should add that prisoners have no idea where they are in the facility,
because their only window to the world looks at the mountains and the sky.
When prisoners leave their cells for recreation they are handcuffed and often shackled, and then
with at least two officers they are taken to the recreation area. This is not a yard, but more like
a walled-up basketball court. Some inmates have been known to call them “dog kennels.”
Another thing you need to know is that the officers there are very professional,
and they are paid well for what they do. Bribery is totally out of the question. The guards in
the towers are equipped with precision rifles. It helps that they are all trained marksmen.
If for some reason a prisoner should ever move freely around the prison, the CCTV technology
is second to none, as are the pressure pads that a prisoner might step on and then set off an alarm.
If an inmate ever got outside, they’d not only be faced with armed marksmen, but they’d have
to scale a 12-foot tall (3.7 m) razor wire fence. If they got over that, they’d have to run through
the desert. You can’t order a getaway car at ADX Florence. It would be spotted a long time
before it got anywhere close to the prison. So, how to get out? Simple hostage taking is
impossible. The guards can’t be bribed. How does a person come up with an ‘elaborate’
plan when they are locked down most of the time and have no idea where they are in the prison?
They are basically kept in a modern dungeon, something human rights activists aren’t happy
about and the reason why quite a few inmates took their life when they got the chance.
But escape-proof prisons have been escaped from before. Could it happen again? The fact is,
officers can become complacent, while inmates have all the time in the world to cook up a plan.
They can’t be denied visits from legal counsel, so they do have a
way to communicate with the outside world. It’s doubtful that any prisoner could escape after
walking out of the cell door – well, two doors, one with bars and another that is solid steel.
Even if someone got out of those, there are many other remote-controlled doors around the prison.
There is just too much security, so we think an El Chapo-type of escape wouldn’t be in the cards.
There is a golf course not too far away, and there’s also a very small town with a population
of 3,914. If there’s any way of getting out of ADX it would be getting to one of those places.
Denver is another 200 miles away, a city where a person could find some anonymity.
But let’s face it, a tunnel digging operation wouldn’t be easy to do without being seen.
It would have to be something out of a James bond movie. We just don’t think it would happen.
In our humble opinion, if you go to ADX you stay there until you are told to move. For some inmates
their cell will feel much like a coffin. That’s why one journalist described the place like this:
“The Supermax is life after death. It's long term. In my opinion, it's far much worse than death.”
Now go watch this, “The Most Insane Ways Men Escaped from Prison.” Or watch this,
“Maximum Security Prison Escape And Insane Crime Spree.”