The attempts by prisoners to escape from prison have mostly
failed, and a large majority of prisoners who try to escape die, or get caught
and sentenced for even longer sentences. Since prison is a place where
prisoners have a lot of time to think, some have used that time thinking of
ways to escape. Prisoners may have connections in the outside world to help
free them from prison, even though the risk of helping someone escape will lead
to that person going to prison as well. With this in mind, I wanted to look at
a few of the most daring and craziest attempts by prisoners to escape beyond
the walls of prison to freedom.
Since the 1970s, pretty much since the time helicopters were commercially available to the public, there have been about 5 different attempts to escape from prison with a helicopter. Although in all 5 cases the escapees and the accomplices helping the inmates escape were caught, it is still amazing that people tried to escape from prison using a helicopter. In most of the cases, a friend outside of the prison learned how to fly a helicopter or hijacked a helicopter (one woman who was a mate of a man in prison hijacked a helicopter in 1978). Trying to pluck a prisoner out of the yard ends up being harder than the masterminds planned, and usually they are shot at or are followed and found not too far away from the prison. Although it takes a daring attempt to use a helicopter to escape, in the end it proved to be a vain attempt to escape in the 5 cases.
Another daring attempt to escape from prison was in a case where 2 people drove a semi-truck through four fences of a prison and rammed into a wall there a prisoner was able to escape with the two culprits. The two people and the inmate then went and got into a car that accompanied the truck, which was being driven by the inmate's mother. The four were able to get away and swapped cars at a gas station a few miles from the prison. The mother and her son were caught near the gas station and the other two people were caught over 40 miles away after hitting another car while driving. It may have seemed like a perfect plan at first, but it did not work out for the mother and the other accomplices. The whole plot was blamed on the mother and she was sentenced to prison.
Although these attempts to escape failed, there was one incident where three prisoners successfully escaped from Alcatraz, and have still never been caught. The men used a utility corridor to get to a ventilation shaft that led to the roof of the prison. The men then used a drill to take out a big enough hole of an air vent for them to escape through, and they scaled the wall and floated away on a raft made out of 50 raincoats glued together. The men made paper mache models of their own heads with real hair from the prison barber shop to take their place in their cells. The men escaped in 1962 and still have not been found.
By: Nick Hammonds
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