Prison Escape

Prison escape is the offense of unlawfully departing from lawful custody, whether from a prison, jail or other correctional facility, or from the custody of an officer during transport or an outside work assignment, committed by a person already held under a criminal charge or conviction. Most legal systems treat escape as a separate offense from whatever crime the person was originally held for, on the reasoning that the escape itself, defying the state's lawful authority to detain, is a distinct wrong regardless of the underlying charge, and a conviction for escape typically adds a further sentence to be served consecutively rather than replacing the original one. The offense is graded in many jurisdictions by the degree of force or planning involved and by the security level of the facility escaped from, with an escape involving violence against a guard, a weapon, or a hostage treated far more severely than an unauthorized failure to return from a supervised outside work program or furlough. Escape investigations and the broader field of correctional security, physical perimeter design, classification of inmates by escape risk, and staff procedure, are closely linked, since most escapes exploit a specific, later-identified gap in physical security or supervision rather than occurring at random.