True stories of prison breaks including those of Frank Abagnale, whose story is told in Catch Me If You Can; Henri Charrière who claimed to have escaped from the supposedly inescapable Devil's Island - the true story as opposed to his questionable memoir, Papillon; Bud Day, said to be the only US serviceman ever to have escaped to South Vietnam; the six prisoners who escaped from Death Row in Mecklenburg Correctional Center; and Pascal Payeret, the French armed robber who escaped not once, but twice from French prisons with the help of a helicopter.
These men for whom there is little else that life has to offer, little or nothing to lose; these are men who are at the limits; these are men who might walk on hot coals without burning their feet.' In the folklore of World War II, the memory of those heroes who staged 'Great Escapes' from PoW camps still endures. But what of the other side of the coin: the audacious and daring breakouts of gangsters and villains today? The focus of Prison Break is one these 'Great Escapes' from civilian prisons, whether the escape is planned or opportunistic, aided from within by corrupt guards or facilitated by a violent gang of intruders. We travel with out subjects as they go over walls, tunnel out, or are lifted from the exercise yard into the skies. The exploits of such legendary Houdini type figures as the 18th Century rogue Jack Sheppard and the Canadian serial escaper Wayne Carlson are recounted alongside tales of breakouts from seemingly unassailable jails; Alcatraz, Northern Ireland's Maze prison, and the Bangkok Hilton.
This edited collection analyses the prison through the most fundamental challenge it faces: escapes. The chapters comprise original research from established prison scholars who develop the contours of a sociology of prison escapes. Drawing on firm empirical evidence from places like India, Tunisia, Canada, the UK, France, Uganda, Italy, Sierra Leone, and Mexico, the authors show how escapes not only break the prison, but are also fundamental to the existence of such institutions: how they are imagined, designed, organized, justified, reproduced and transformed. The chapters are organised in four interconnected themes: resistance and everyday life; politics and transition; imaginaries and popular culture; and law and bureaucracy, which reflect how escapes are productive, local, historical, and equivocal social practices, and integral to the mysterious intransigence of the prison. The result is a critical and theoretically informed understanding of prison escapes – which has so far been absent in prison scholarship – and which will hold broad appeal to academics and students of prisons and penology, as well as practitioners.
TIME-LIFE presents Great Prisons Escapes: Thrilling Tales of How they Got Away. Includes the true story behind the Papillon legend, the story for Tupac's godmother, and the real con artist of Catch Me If You Can.
This “fast-paced account” of WWI airmen who escaped Germany’s most notorious POW camp is “expertly narrated” by the New York Times bestselling author (Kirkus, starred review). During World War I, Allied soldiers might avoid death only to find themselves in the abominable conditions of Germany’s many prison camps. The most infamous was Holzminden, a land-locked Alcatraz that housed the most escape-prone officers. Its commandant was a boorish tyrant named Karl Niemeyer, who swore that none should ever leave. Desperate to break out of “Hellminden”, a group of Allied prisoners hatch an audacious escape plan that requires a risky feat of engineering as well as a bevy of disguises, forged documents, and fake walls—not to mention steely resolve and total secrecy. Once beyond the watchtowers and round-the-clock patrols, they are then faced with a 150-mile dash through enemy-occupied territory toward free Holland. Drawing on never-before-seen memoirs and letters, historian Neal Bascomb “has unearthed a remarkable piece of hidden history, and told it perfectly. The story brims with adventure, suspense, daring, and heroism” (David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon).
Yoshie Shiratori, aka the Prison Break Magician, was born on July 31, 1907 in Aomori, Japan. He is best known for having an escape from prison four times. Yoshie Shiratori is Japan's own Harry Houdini, and not even handcuffs, copper walls, or dislocated shoulder could stop his daring escapes. This book has 5 chapters each dedicated to Yoshie Shiratori's different escape plans. Yoshie Shiratori is superhuman with immense strength he had suffered from extreme cold weather of japan to specially made solitary confinement for him.Chapter 1: Lockpick Method.Aomori, Japan, 1936, prisoner Yoshie Shiratori had enough he was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit. Falsely imprisoned in Aomori Prison, where he was beaten and tortured every night by prison guards, and now worse, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty.In his mind, it was time to go, but Aomori Prison wasn't the easiest to escape. Regardless, Yoshie Shiratori had nothing to lose. And so at 5:30 a.m., he made his move he knew there would be a 15-minute gap in the patrol time, as he had studied the guards' routine for months. And when the coast was clear, he pulled out a metal wire which he had smuggled in from the bathhouse and started to pick the lock.This was originally the metal support ring that was wrapped around the bathing buckets inmates use to wash themselves. His hands were stiff from the wintry cold but after a few minutes of picking, he had success, and his cell door swung open. But he wasn't out of the woods yet because there were more locked doors ahead.He knew he only had a few minutes left before the guards would return, and so he wasted no time attempting to pick his way through the remaining security doors. Now fortunately for him, he was able to make it out of the facility. But, the bad news was that he was only halfway to freedom. You see, he was still well within the search perimeter, which meant at any moment the alarm could go off and he'd still be caught.At 5:45 a.m. the guards returned, peering into his cell and this is what they saw, Shiratori sound asleep in his futon bed. But of course, what they didn't realize was that they were looking at something else, a pile of loose floorboards underneath his duvet designed to trick them.It wasn't until the next morning that they finally discovered the truth, and the alarm was sounded. But by then Shiratori was long gone. Now he had escaped.But things aren't always as they seem. In fact, for Yoshie Shiratori, aka the Prison Break Magician, this was only the beginning.Three days later he was caught trying to steal supplies from a hospital and just like that, he was back in the slammer.But this time for his escape attempt he was sentenced to life in prison. He would never be with his family again - his wife and his daughter. And all the months of planning had led to just three days of freedom, and now it seemed he'd be locked up for a very long time.Six years later, in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, Shiratori found himself transferred to Akita Prison in Akita City. There the guards treated him even worse than in Aomori they had heard aboutShiratori's previous escape and were determined to make an example out of him they wanted to make sure he would never escape again.Along with the usual beatings, he was forced to partake in extreme manual labor, made to sleep on the hard concrete floor in the severe winter cold, and placed into solitary confinement for extended periods of time.Now, this was a specially-made solitary confinement cell that was very small and had a very high ceiling, with the walls covered with copper sheets so smooth that it was impossible to grip.In addition, there was almost no sunlight even in the daytime, with the only window light coming from a small sealed skylight high above.................................................
For the past four decades, a rich scholarship has investigated the emergence of the prison in Europe and North America, mainly the connection between institutional architecture, techniques of social control, and mechanisms of discipline. Prison Architecture and Punishment in Colonial Senegal asks if these connections did exist in colonial Senegal since prisons in Africa had never been the focus of such scholarship. This book addresses three main themes. First, it analyzes prison buildings and their changing architectural forms throughout the colonial period to highlight how the French used prison architecture to control Africans. Second, it describes the connections between the internal layout of prison spaces and punishment to show how the design of prisons expressed the notions of punishment and reforms. The book also undertakes a critical assessment of inmates’ agency in reshaping the world of prisons in colonial Senegal. Finally, it discusses the legacy of colonial prisons in independent Senegal. By providing a comprehensive history of prison architecture in Senegal, the book helps insert Africa into a more global history by offering a uniquely comparative study of colonialism, architecture, and punishment.
On April 4, 1943, ten American prisoners of war and two Filipino convicts executed a daring escape from one of Japan’s most notorious prison camps. The prisoners were survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March and the Fall of Corregidor, and the prison from which they escaped was surrounded by an impenetrable swamp and reputedly escape-proof. Theirs was the only successful group escape from a Japanese POW camp during the Pacific war. Escape from Davao is the story of one of the most remarkable incidents in the Second World War and of what happened when the Americans returned home to tell the world what they had witnessed. Davao Penal Colony, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, was a prison plantation where thousands of American POWs toiled alongside Filipino criminals and suffered from tropical diseases and malnutrition, as well as the cruelty of their captors. The American servicemen were rotting in a hellhole from which escape was considered impossible, but ten of them, realizing that inaction meant certain death, planned to escape. Their bold plan succeeded with the help of Filipino allies, both patriots and the guerrillas who fought the Japanese sent to recapture them. Their trek to freedom repeatedly put the Americans in jeopardy, yet they eventually succeeded in returning home to the United States to fulfill their self-appointed mission: to tell Americans about Japanese atrocities and to rally the country to the plight of their comrades still in captivity. But the government and the military had a different timetable for the liberation of the Philippines and ordered the men to remain silent. Their testimony, when it finally emerged, galvanized the nation behind the Pacific war effort and made the men celebrities. Over the decades this remarkable story, called the “greatest story of the war in the Pacific” by the War Department in 1944, has faded away. Because of wartime censorship, the full story has never been told until now. John D. Lukacs spent years researching this heroic event, interviewing survivors, reading their letters, searching archival documents, and traveling to the decaying prison camp and its surroundings. His dramatic, gripping account of the escape brings this remarkable tale back to life, where a new generation can admire the resourcefulness and patriotism of the men who fought the Pacific war.
