Skip to footer

Mississippi prison escape: How common are jailbreaks?

Two prison escapees have been captured and two remain at large after breaking out of Mississippi's Hinds County Detention Center.

|
Hinds County Sheriff's Office via Reuters
(L-R) Jermaine Wilson and Kevin Holmes, along with two other inmates, escaped from Raymond Detention Center near Jackson, Mississippi on Monday. Wilson and Holmes were re-apprehended Monday evening and Tuesday morning, respectively.

Four inmates escaped from a Mississippi jail on Monday. As of Tuesday afternoon, two have been apprehended and two are still at-large.

The four prisoners escaped from the Raymond Detention Center near Jackson around 12:45am on Monday. On Monday evening, 19-year old Jermaine Wilson was recaptured without incident. On Tuesday, 18-year old Kevin Holmes was also arrested without incident.

Wilson is charged with capital murder in the 2012 rape and killing of a woman, according to Reuters. Holmes faces three counts of armed robbery.

The remaining two men are 25-year old Montreal Damon-Anderson, charged with recovered stolen property, and 23-year old John Rollins, charged with auto theft and false pretense. Both Rollins and Holmes are also charged with malicious mischief.

The Hinds County sheriff’s office indicated that “this was a prearranged and preplanned escape.”

“They have had some help from the inside and outside,” Sheriff Tyrone Lewis told the Associated Press, though he gave no other details.

“We won’t stop nor sleep until the other three are recaptured,” Lewis said in a statement before Holmes was recaptured on Tuesday.

This Mississippi jailbreak comes right after two convicted murderers escaped from a maximum-security prison in New York. That ordeal ended last week with one of them shot dead and the other back behind bars.

Not to mention Sinaola cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera’s escape from a Mexican prison on Sunday.

But despite the media attention, jailbreaks aren’t as common as one would think. According to the Washington Post, despite 1.5 million inmates imprisoned, only 2,001 people serving sentences of more than one year escaped or went AWOL in 2013. That follows a trend of fewer escapes over the past decade.

Most escapes happen in minimum-security prisons or holding cells, where it’s more likely for an inmate to just “walk away” or not show up for a mandatory check-in, as Slate reported in 2001. Indeed, it's rare for an inmate, especially one at a perimeter-secured institution, to escape, and even rarer for them to stay that way.

“Dramatic, Hollywood-style escapes from maximum security prisons are the ones that draw media attention. Like their maximum security counterparts, the minimum security walk-aways are usually recovered,” Slate writes.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Mississippi prison escape: How common are jailbreaks?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0714/Mississippi-prison-escape-How-common-are-jailbreaks
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe