One left in New Jersey on September 12, 2015, after at least nine other prisoners have escaped from custody since the summer began. When people told me as a child that summer meant freedom, I never would have guessed it would be like this.
When it comes to escapes, the weak points in a prison aren't in the walls or the steampipes, like the New York escape by Richard Matt and David Sweat suggested. The holes are in the people who run the facility. Preventing another prison escape is not a construction or design matter. It's a human resources task of culling out corruption. Ask the prison staffers who helped El Chapo get free and remain on the loose now for two months.
While I served six-plus years at York Correctional Institution, my cell was in the highest security building; my cellmates were serving 12 to 45 year sentences. From my window, I had a clear view of the road that surrounded the compound. Unlike the view of that road from minimum security side of the prison, my view of the road was decorated with electrified chain link, hardly a screen to watching a silver pickup truck - with a very visible shotgun hanging in the rear window - manned by a guard assigned to drive the perimeter of the grounds. When the guard did his or her job, I could time my laundry by the silver truck's appearance; every few minutes it would cross my window at constant speed. Five or six sightings meant that should ask the laundry worker to put my kitchen uniform in the dryer.
Other days, I would lose track of time because the truck would idle, sometimes for as long as twenty minutes, in front of my cell. I would watch closely, trying to make out what the guard was doing. No other truck ever passed by, covering his assignment. I used to wonder what could happen on the other side where no chain link twists backed up the perimeter surveillance.
I learned what could happen when the prison underwent two separate escapes from the minimum security side where there is no fence or wall to bore through to get to freedom. Two women walked away from the gym where their unit had been sent for evening recreation. It's maybe a 50-yard walk between the gym and their unit, a short enough distance for a guard to stand in place and watch and count the inmates as they walked from one building to the other. But it was night time in January and no one was out there as they made their break. The perimeter driver didn't see them either.
Approximately three months later, another woman, an inmate who happened to be suffering emotionally, escaped her feelings by walking through the woods when she had been released to pre-breakfast blood-sugar testing for diabetic inmates. She was supposed to report directly to the dining hall after her Accucheck. Perimeter driver missed her, too.
Corruption in a prison isn't always the result of craven opportunism with guards' smuggling in cell phones, cocaine, or cigarettes for wads of cash that supplement their meager paychecks. Some prison corruption is as simple as a guard sleeping when she is being paid to work or checking his email on his phone on the side of the road he is supposed to be driving and watching an unfenced prison compound.
It's not that exploiting these weak points is new. There are over 220 inmates currently on escape status in the United States, at least as far as the Associated Press can determine. People have been slacking off for centuries.
"Wilful incompetence" was first documented in World War II when soldiers exhibited "passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism." Interestingly enough, these exact behaviors made it into the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a diagnosable mental illness: passive aggression. But at the time, being a shirker was attributed to routine stress and immaturity. No one examined how many deaths could have been prevented had wilful incompetence not occurred in foreign battlefields.
That's the amazing worldview that living in a prison imparts on you. You understand every problem, every accident, every crime - whether it's in a prison or outside of it - as the result of someone, somewhere, failing to do his job. A child dies at the hands of a serial killer because cops don't investigate why a teenager is naked, incoherent and bleeding. A plane crashes on the pilot's suicide mission because no one made sure that he wasn't taking SSRI anti-depressants. Prisoners escape and kill a vacationing couple, probably because someone was asleep or on the side of the road at the prison. After you've done time, you can practically draw the connections between the failures and the results with a Sharpie.
By extension, if every breach is connected to someone's not going his job, then every success originates not necessarily in skill, luck or teamwork, but just performance. To prevent more of the escapes that made the summer of 2015 a true summer of freedom, all anyone has to do is his job.