The Great Escapes

As long as you have prisoners behind bars you will also have prisoners attempting to get out from behind those bars. Can you blame them? Being held captive, in any form or situation, is not a natural state of affairs for humans or animals alike and any one of us would do our best to alleviate that situation if we could. It is said that captive wolves will chew their own legs off to get free of a trap. My mother had a canary named Dickie that chewed its toes off, but I think that had another implication to it, something akin to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Escape attempts are not uncommon in any jail and we certainly had our share. I mentioned earlier the three Amigos who got out through an air vent and wound up being hosted in an elderly couple’s home until the SWAT team arrived. And there was an inmate who escaped through the roof of the Rec yard and stayed on the loose for a number of years before his own son turned him in.

Work Furlough inmates now and then get the itch to run, too. They leave for work from the jail and for some strange reason, decide not to return that night. It’s like some big stupid cell in their brain takes over and they lose all concept of rational thinking. Their feet begin to move in a direction away from the jail and they end up hitchhiking to Lodi or Tonopah or some other little known outpost. Ah - life on the lam!

The maximum amount of time anyone can be sentenced to jail in Yavapai County is 365 days. Some inmates are there longer than that, but only if they are awaiting trial on major cases. Prison is another thing, that’s for long-term confinement. But the County jail is for less serious offenders and a year or less is as much time as they can do. When they are given a work furlough it is usually after they have already been in jail for a while and so that amount of time is typically much less than a year, four to six months is the average.

When a person does not return to the jail at the end of his work furlough day, he or she is charged with escape, which is an automatic two year sentence in DOC (Department of Corrections). They are not ignorant of this, they know the consequences. So it always has amazed me when a work furlough inmate turns heel and goes on the lam. Let’s weigh this for a moment: six months of work release jail time, or two years prison? Hmmm…big decision. Still, they do attempt it now and then. To date, I believe they have all been apprehended.

There are other ways of trying to escape jail as well. We’ve had inmates swallow weird objects or purposefully break bones to try and get to the hospital for a chance to break away. This has come close to being successful once or twice but so far, to my knowledge, no one has made it.
And then there was Noel, who managed to crawl up into the ceiling from the visitation area and ended up getting hopelessly lost. You have to understand how the jail is constructed to fully get the picture. Yavapai County Jail takes up the second floor of a three-story building and so there is no free space to speak of above or below; just a crawl space area for pipes, vents and electrical wiring. That crawl space is crisscrossed with metal beams, separating it into compartments with the express reason of foiling such escape attempts. Anything larger than a cockroach would have trouble navigating about. If Noel had found his way into an air duct, and was thin enough to wriggle through, he might have eventually found sunlight, but he was not and did not.

It was no secret he had made his way from visitation up into the ceiling. It was also no secret he would be stuck up there and would, in time, have to come back down. So everyone waited. It was summer, it was hot, and there was no food or water or sanitation stations in the crawl space above the ceiling, so it had to be a simple matter of time. We began taking bets on how long Noel could hold out.

It was Lena who made the bust. She had come a long way from her fateful involvement with Misty and the wet roll of cash, and by then she was very good at manipulating inmates into doing what she wanted them to do. She learned that from me, I might add. I was the best inmate-manipulator in the County. It was three days after Noel’s celebrated escape attempt up into the crawl space and Lena was standing just outside the visitation door, not fifteen feet from where Noel had climbed up through the ceiling tiles, when she heard a still, small voice from above, “Leeenaahhh…helllp meee!”

Lena’s reaction was to look up and around in the direction of the faint voice, but all she saw were ceiling tiles, “Yeah? Who’s that?” she asked.

“It’s me – Noel- I’m dyin’ up here - get me out!”

The reaction from Lena was hysterical laughter. The same reaction came from all the officers who dragged Noel, dehydrated, hungry, and filthy from the confines of the ceiling crawl space. He was covered with insulation and dirt, which in turn had swathed his body in an oozing rash. His hair was full of cobwebs and bugs, his pupils were dilated to the size of nickels from being in the dark, and he had worn his elbows and knees raw trying to maneuver about.

Noel was not charged with attempted escape even though we could have done so. Everyone figured he had suffered enough. Even Noel admitted the plan was not a brilliant one. His body finally healed and he got his dignity back to some degree, but no one who was there that day has ever forgotten his mournful, pitiful voice emanating from the ceiling by the visitation room, “Leeenaahh…helllp meee…”