Not all prison escapes result in freedom

If I saw a TV show depicting a guy breaking out of a modern prison by clinging to the underside of a delivery van, I would immediately switch channels. Too far-fetched. No way in this day and age, could a prisoner escape so simply and yet that’s precisely what did happen.

A former soldier absconded from the prison kitchen at HMP Wandsworth by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery van. Daniel Abed Khalife, 21, changed out of the prison kitchen uniform into a black baseball cap, black T-shirt and dark-coloured trousers to prepare himself for life on the outside.

Unfortunately for him, his freedom was short-lived. He escaped at 7.30am on a Wednesday and was declared missing twenty minutes later. The van was stopped by police less than an hour after that but Mr. Khalife was no longer attached to it. He was arrested a few days later on Saturday and returned to prison.

A few red-faced officials were left scratching their heads in the aftermath of the escape but it’s not the first-time prison authorities got caught on the hop and it probably won’t be the last.

Alcatraz prison in San Francisco served as a federal prison from 1934 to 1963 and housed some of the most dangerous prisoners of all time. Known as The Rock, it was supposed to be impossible to escape from. Attempts were rare, but a few inmates did manage it but whether they survived the currents of the bay, or the sharks is unknown.

According to History.com there were 14 different escape attempts involving 36 inmates. The most celebrated effort took place in June 1962, when three prisoners fled the island on a raft constructed from raincoats. In the months leading up to their daring escape, the men had used homemade tools to widen the ventilation holes in the walls of their cells, which they crawled through on the night they vanished.

In their beds, they left lifelike dummy heads as decoys. Despite a lengthy, large-scale manhunt, the fugitives were never heard from again and authorities believe they likely drowned in the San Francisco Bay’s strong, cold currents. Clint Eastwood starred in a 1979 movie about that breakout called “Escape from Alcatraz.”

Of all the prisoners who attempted to flee Alcatraz, 23 were captured, six were shot and killed while trying to escape and two drowned. An additional five, including the three who broke out in 1962, remain unaccounted for and are presumed drowned.

A century earlier, on February 9, 1864, 109 Union officers tunnelled their way out of Libby Prison, a bleak, Confederate prisoner-of-war facility in Richmond, Virginia. After opening in March 1962, the prison, situated in a former tobacco warehouse, quickly became an overcrowded, disease-ridden place where prisoners were subjected to severe food shortages.

Starting in the Autumn of 1863, a group of inmates made three failed attempts to dig tunnels out of the prison. With rats crawling over them as they laboured in secret, the men finally managed to dig a fourth tunnel 50 feet long and escaped. Fifty-nine of the men eventually reached Union territory, while 48 were recaptured and two drowned.

On February 22, 2014, one of the world’s most-wanted criminals, drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, was arrested after outrunning law enforcement for more than a decade. Guzman, a third-grade dropout, was first arrested in 1993 and sentenced to 20 years behind bars for murder.

While locked up in a high-security prison in the Mexican state of Jalisco, he paid off the staff and continued to run his criminal enterprise. In 2001, he escaped the facility; some accounts claim Guzman was wheeled out in a laundry cart, while other sources suggest prison officials simply let him walk out.

For years afterward, he used violence, bribery and a large network of informants to help him remain a fugitive. His cartel grew into the largest supplier of illegal narcotics to America, and the U.S. government offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

On February 22, 2014, law enforcement agents finally tracked him down to an apartment in Mazatlán, Mexico, and arrested him. However, on July 11, 2015, Guzman, then incarcerated at the nation’s highest-security penitentiary, Altiplano beyond Mexico City, once again escaped, this time via a hole in the floor of his cell and out through a mile-long tunnel that had been secretly dug and equipped with lights and ventilation. Guzman was re-captured by Mexican authorities in 2016.

Security must have been a bit more relaxed in the eighteenth century. After joining the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Catholic nobleman William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was locked up in the Tower of London, found guilty of treason and sentenced to die. Shortly before her husband was to be executed, Lady Nithsdale went to visit him in prison in 1716, accompanied by her maid and several female friends.

The group smuggled in women’s clothing for the earl then spirited him out of the Tower of London disguised as a female. The earl fled England, this time masquerading as a servant to a Venetian ambassador and ended up in Rome. Lady Nithsdale fled Britain separately to meet her husband in Rome, where they resided in exile.

Not every escape attempt was as well thought out as that though. Kenneth Burnum, a prisoner in Hamilton County Jail in Tennessee, heard another prisoner was about to be released on bail. His plan was to pretend to be the other inmate and take his place when officers arrived to collect him.

Burnum stood up when Taylor’s name was called and filled out the release forms but when he was sent for final identity verification, officers discovered one glaring distinction between the two men. The prisoner scheduled for release was black while Burnum was white.