Over the weekend, Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. The escape has generated considerable press attention in part because both are convicted murderers and because exactly how rare escapes from prison have become. Some numbers that the Christian Science Monitor got from Newsweek:
Newsweek cites US Department of Justice data showing 1,599 inmates from state and federal prisons escaped in 2012, the most recent year for which data are available, though not all states reported. In 2011, the count was 2,016 and in 2010, it was 1,802.
“Those numbers are down significantly from previous years, even as the prison population has skyrocketed, according to federal data cited in the journal Punishment & Society,” Newsweek reported in May. “In 1981, the rate of escapes was 12.44 for every 1,000 inmates. By 1991, the rate was down to 3.49 and in 2001, it was 0.87, adding up to a 93 percent drop in two decades.”
FiveThirtyEight also provides some interesting statistics on prison escapes, including that most convicts that do manage to escape are quickly caught:
In recent years, completed escapes have been fleeting. Between 2002 and 2013, 30 prisoners managed to complete an escape from a New York prison, meaning that they got off of the premises. But 60 percent of these prisoners were back in custody within six hours. Every remaining prisoner save one was caught within 24 hours of escape. And that last, longest-at-large prisoner still didn’t manage to go on the lam permanently — he was back in a cell within three days.
