By Danielle Keeton-Olsen
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS — Corrections officers in the 1970s called the practice of prisoners creating tools out of everyday items to help them escape “mush-faking.”
Prisoners would flatten and sharpen metal spoons to slice like razors. They also reinforced ballpoint pens to dig through mortar in the brick walls, making mortar walls a problem, said former corrections officer David Meyers.
But the tales of Ohio inmates making daring escapes with makeshift tools are mostly history. There hasn’t been a long-term escape in the state since 1992.
That escapee, Roger D. Perdue, walked away from his work detail at the London Correctional Institution in Madison County. He was caught earlier this month in Indiana, where he had been living under an assumed name. He is now 71 and will serve the remaining five years of his sentence for grand theft.
In the past four years, there have been nine escape attempts at Ohio prisons, but every inmate who managed to get outside prison walls or walk away from a work detail was captured within 24 hours — except for one inmate who was on the run for 12 days.
State prison records dating back to 2002 show that inmates who escaped were gone for an average of about five days before being recaptured.
Three of the 28 escape reports were omitted from analysis because those prisoners’ time of recapture was unclear.
Prison officials said they have focused on tightening security, leading to fewer long-term escapes.
All of the inmates on the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s fugitive list are at least 65 years old. The oldest among them, Howard Phillips, would be 111. He escaped 58 years ago. But the State Highway Patrol, which works with the Department of Rehabilitation to capture escaped prisoners, won’t close Phillips’ case file until he is captured or proven dead, said Lt. Craig Cvetan, the patrol’s spokesman.
Corrections facilities’ basic defenses against escape include razor-ribbon-lined fences and motion-sensing video cameras.
The September escape from the Allen Oakwood Correctional Institution in Lima of three inmates, including Chardon High School shooter T.J. Lane, motivated the prison staff to look into security measures.
“What it typically is, is a combination of failures, either in technology or personnel,” said Ed Voorhies, director of operations at the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “There are usually multiple shortfalls or malfunctions that enable an escape to take place.”
At Allen Oakwood, the three inmates escaped because of a combination of a damaged security camera, access to a maintenance-access area and lax inmate security, according to a state report about the escape.
The three inmates — Lane, Lindsey Bruce of Columbus and Clifford Opperud of Carlisle, in southwestern Ohio — built a ladder over a period of weeks using materials from a maintenance area. The 13½-foot ladder allowed them to scale a fence.
Bruce, who is serving a life sentence for killing 5-year-old Emily Rimel of Franklin County’s Madison Township, was caught within minutes. Lane was at large for about five hours, and Opperud, who was serving 12 years for robbery, was caught eight hours later.
Today, they are secured in the Ohio State Penitentiary at Youngstown, the state’s “supermax” prison.
The state is researching new technology for some of its medium- and high-security prisons that involves nonlethal electric fencing, which would stun but not kill people who come into contact with it, Voorhies said.
The security staff, however, is one of the greatest barriers to an escape, he said. Corrections officers are to inspect facilities multiple times during shifts.
In Ohio prisons, there is an average of seven inmates for every one correction officer.
More escapes or walkaways happen at medium-security facilities than higher-security prisons, where there is usually a higher guard-to-inmate ratio. Of the state’s 28 facilities, 12 have had escapes or walkaways since 2002. Ross and Pickaway correctional institutions tied for the highest number of escapes: five.
Pickaway County’s institution also saw the longest escape in the past decade, when inmate Anthony Bowling was on the lam for almost 61 days in 2005.
Ross, now a high-security prison, hasn’t had an escape since 2010.
The risk of using prison labor at work facilities is one that Voorhies sees as worth taking to make Ohio’s prisons at least partially self-sustaining. Inmates work at farms and beverage plants to prepare their own food, for example.
“We have to balance that safety concern with our operational concerns and the significant positive benefits we get from putting about 1,000 inmates a day outside the fence,” Voorhies said.