Miscellaneous

This is like a literal "get out of jail free" card

This is unbelievable. Five years ago, Dwayne Keith Fitzen was serving a 24 year prison sentence in Minnesota, and prison officials decided to transfer him to California. So you know how they had the inmate known as "Shadow" transferred? They gave him a bus ticket and told him to hop on the Greyhound. With no supervision. On a two-day bus trip. And lo-and-behold, he hopped off the bus in Vegas and vanished like a fart in the wind.

The truly amazing thing is that this is a common practice:

Since April 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has allowed 89,794 federal inmates to be transferred without escorts, traveling mainly by bus.

The inmates are pre-screened and considered to be low-risk. And the stat that only about 0.2% of these inmates have fled while the transfer is low, sure. But that still means that 180 felons got a chance to bolt for freedom. How many, for certain, have fled? How many who have fled have been re-snagged? The government doesn't even know because, in another show of their genius, they don't even have firm numbers here (although they do know that 77 inmates fled from this program from October 2003 through September 2005, with 17 of them having never been caught). And ok, the vast majority of those being escorted are on their way to halfway houses, where they get to be out in public and what-not anyway. But still, in "the past three years 5,347 federal inmates have been transferred unescorted to minimum-security facilities, more commonly called prison camps."

Government at work! Sleep safe, citizens.

Full post as published by Quiz Law on June 09, 2009 (boomark / email).