Staffing shortages, old facilities, and ‘nothing to lose’: These are the factors that contribute to prison breaks across the country

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — It sounded like something out of a movie: Ten inmates at a New Orleans jail surreptitiously cut through cell walls using electric hair trimmers before fleeing into the dead of night when an employee tasked with watching security cameras stepped away for food.

But it was real life — and experts say escapes from correctional facilities happen every year across the country.

The New Orleans escapes have attracted media attention in part because of the inmates’ “fantastical escape method,” according to Bryce Peterson, a research scientist who studies law enforcement and corrections facilities at CNA, a security-focused research organization.

But so-called “flight escapes,” in which inmates have to overcome a physical barrier by “either through tunneling or cutting or climbing,” are not unheard of in reality, Peterson said.

Neither are “deception escapes,” like the Sunday escape of an Arkansas former police chief serving decades-long sentences for rape and murder, who reportedly donned a makeshift law enforcement outfit when he escaped from prison.

“Escapes like this happen every year,” Peterson told CNN.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many escapes take place annually due to a lack of centralized data collection. Peterson noted that escapes from minimum-security facilities, like halfway houses, are much more common than those at jails and prisons. Federal data shows escape offenses accounted for less than one percent (0.4%) of all federal offenses between 2017 and 2021.

Most escapes from correctional facilities never become news because the escapees are recaptured shortly, Peterson said.

The recent escapes follow several other high-profile breakouts, like that of Danilo Cavalcante, a convicted murderer who escaped from a Pennsylvania prison, sparking a two-week manhunt, and the escape of four inmates from a Georgia jail in 2023.

Here’s more on what we know about jail and prison escapes – and the factors that make them possible.

‘Motivation and opportunity’

Prison and jail escapes happen when inmates have a combination of two things: “Motivation and opportunity,” said Peterson.

Motivation is “inherent,” he said, particularly among inmates facing more serious charges. “They have nothing to lose,” Peterson added.

These inmates are also more likely to attempt to break out of jails, where security is lower and the environment more “chaotic,” before they’re moved to a more secure prison.

In the New Orleans case, inmates seem to have capitalized on a “confluence” of factors that provided the opportunity to escape, Peterson said, including understaffing and faulty locks at the facility, as well as help on both the inside and the outside.

Peterson noted that escapees receiving outside assistance — like from friends or family members — is much more common than receiving help from staff inside a prison or jail.

At least 13 people have been arrested for allegedly assisting the New Orleans escapees either before, during or after the jailbreak. The district attorney has pledged to “identify and hold accountable anyone who facilitated or assisted with this historic jailbreak.”

Staying free may be even harder than escaping. Around 91 percent of escapees are recaptured within a year, according to a 2024 study led by Peterson. And of those recaptured, 81.5 percent were back in custody within 1 week of the escape.

“Most people are recaptured pretty quickly, but the longer you’re out, the more likely it is that you’re gonna stay out for a long period of time,” he said.

In New Orleans, where the two remaining escapees have spent more than a week on the lam, “it’s looking more and more likely that some of them are gonna be out for a long time before they’re recaptured.”

Chronic understaffing

The most consistent factor that contributes to prison or jail escapes is human error linked to staffing shortages, several experts told CNN.

“Somebody took a shortcut, didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” Joseph Gunja, a security consultant who previously worked as a warden for several federal prisons, told CNN. “The inmates figured out how they were gonna use that weakness to their advantage, and escaped.”

“Sometime it’s just a small mistake, like, you don’t pat search somebody, or you don’t search a cell, or you let an inmate go into an area he shouldn’t be,” he said. “And then those things pile up.”

Sometimes inmates may watch and monitor certain mistakes or lapses in security for months before planning an escape, Gunja said.

Similarly, Joe Russo, a program manager at the University of Denver whose research focuses on institutional and community corrections technologies, told CNN that correctional facilities “live and die by their staff.”

Staff shortages have increased since the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, and some facilities have lowered their educational requirements to try to meet staffing targets. Russo was the lead author of a 2019 report that identified insufficient staffing as the primary threat to security at correctional facilities.

“When staff are stretched too thin, or tired, or fatigued, or overly stressed, or traumatized, whatever the case might be, you have lowered vigilance,” he added.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson has cited understaffing as a key contributor to the disaster. The jail is only about 60% staffed, and 150 more deputies are needed, the sheriff said.

On the morning of May 16, when the escape occurred, there were four supervisors and 36 staff on-site, which Chief of Corrections Jay Mallett called a “low ratio.”

Outdated facilities

Aging facilities with faltering equipment can also contribute to escapes.

“A lot of facilities out there have aging infrastructure,” Russo told CNN. “They’re kind of crumbling, a lot of deferred maintenance over the years because they don’t have the money to keep these facilities up to par.”

“You may not have the proper camera coverage,” he said. “There may be blind spots in the facility. Or they’re just not taking advantage of the latest technologies out there that could prevent escapes.”

In New Orleans, the sheriff has highlighted locks she said were defective and called for funding to update correctional facilities. “There are deficiencies in these facilities that cause public safety concerns,” she said.

Community distrust

Police are also heavily reliant on tips from the local community to help recapture escaped inmates, Petersen explained.

So when the community has a fractured relationship with police, that can make it harder to recapture escapees.

“When there’s a lack of trust in social structure and the police and law and courts, of course folks are gonna be less willing to turn turn someone in,” Russo said.

“It’s kind of a sad, double-edged sword, where these folks are responsible for committing crimes and violence in the community, but yet due to that lack of trust in law enforcement, they’re not brought to justice,” he said.

This is particularly true in Louisiana, where police have faced accusations of systemic misconduct. In January, the Department of Justice found a years-long pattern of “unlawful conduct” at Louisiana State Police that put the public at “serious risk of harm.”

Fourteen years ago, the department accused the New Orleans Police Department of unconstitutional conduct, triggering the nation’s “most expansive Consent Decree” in a bid for sweeping reforms. Among other changes, the department implemented widespread usage of body-worn cameras among officers.

Despite the reforms, mistrust of law enforcement is widespread: Residents are five times as likely to hold a negative view of city police as a positive view, according to a 2024 survey by the New Orleans Crime Coalition.

“If we feel like the law enforcement was here to help us, we would help them,” one New Orleans resident, 48-year-old Mario Westbrook, told the Associated Press.

“Our community, the police come back here, they have no respect for us as human beings,” Westbrook said.

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