2023 might have been the 'Year of the Prison Break'

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — With good reason, 2023 may be remembered in Philadelphia as The Year of the Prison Break. Three known escapes from Philadelphia jails this year resulted in four prisoners getting past prison walls — with varying degrees of success.

Perhaps best remembered is the escape of Nasir Grant, 18, and Ameen Hurst, 24, from Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center in May and the 10-day hunt to get them both back in custody.

On May 3, the union representing the city’s correctional officers had announced a “no confidence” vote in Philadelphia Department of Prisons Commissioner Blanche Carney, citing ongoing challenges and “disarray” behind the prison walls.

For some time, AFSCME Local 159 has been calling on Kenney to remove Carney, who has led the Department of Prisons for about seven years.

“Under her leadership, it's been nothing but disarray. Morale is at an all time low. Staff levels are down. Incarcerated persons are even in danger,” said AFSCME Local 159 President David Robinson. “There's no safety. There's no one taking initiative to say, ‘Hey, let's get this back in order.'”

A city spokesperson said Philadelphia officials had been working with her to address workers’ concerns — and that Carney had the support and confidence of the administration.

Four days later, on the evening of May 7, it took about 90 seconds for Nasir Grant, 18, and Ameen Hurst, 24, to escape from Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center through a hole in a fence. Grant was facing drug and gun charges and related offenses; Hurst is accused of four murders.

Prison officials didn’t notice their escape for more than 18 hours.

It took authorities 10 days to get them both back in custody. U.S. Marshals arrested Grant on May 11 after spotting him in North Philadelphia, and they arrested Hurst in Southwest Philadelphia, as he was getting into a car with his mother and brother, the morning of May 17.

At least three additional people are accused of helping the pair escape, including their alleged lookout in the prison, 35-year-old Jose Flores-Huerta, who himself faces charges for the fatal beating of a man outside Pat’s Steaks in 2021. All three have been charged with escape, conspiracy, criminal use of a communication facility and hindering apprehension.

The 10-day manhunt had the city on edge and the mayor fuming.

“I’m really angry about it. There’s no reason for this. And if everybody had followed through and did what they’re supposed to do, we wouldn’t have this problem,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at the time.

“Clearly the system is screwed up, and people didn’t do what they were supposed to do. It’s clear. But we want to find out exactly who, exactly how — and what we’ve got to do to shore it back up again.”

The incident placed further scrutiny on Carney. “We have protocols in place, and these protocols were not followed,” she said at the time, promising a complete investigation.

Another escape from the same prison was narrowly avoided just four months later. Prison officials said a 30-year-old woman, new to PICC, slipped out of the receiving room on Sept. 10 because a correctional officer did not secure the door. She climbed over a barbed-wire perimeter fence and she was quickly taken back into custody.

District Attorney Larry Krasner, in a Nov. 1 City Council hearing, presented video evidence showing Grant and Hurst opening the doors of their cells and simply walking out, strolling through a hallway. Then, with Flores-Huerta allegedly acting as lookout through an unguarded space, they can be seen crawling through a door and into the prison yard, where they then slip through a hole in the fence that had been cut seven weeks earlier.

Krasner says prison guards knew about that hole in the fence. He also says a guard walked off his post halfway through an overtime shift, leaving the path to the yard unguarded for four hours. The next guard, who was supposed to do a headcount, took a nap.

Krasner said Hurst and Grant did get stuck for some time between two fences, where sensors should have alerted guards to their presence — but those sensors had been turned off a decade prior because geese kept setting them off. In fact, Krasner says, Hurst and Grant climbed the sensor poles to get over the fence.

Carney says she has begun to make improvements to the prisons, including new locks, lights and cameras — but she said staffing and retention is their biggest obstacle.

Yet that was not the end of Carney’s troubles.

On Nov. 30, Gino Hagenkotter, 34, who was incarcerated at Riverside Correctional Facility, became the fourth prisoner known to have escaped a city jail this year.

While on an outside work assignment with the Philadelphia Orchard Project behind PICC, Hagenkotter asked to use the restroom. And, said Carney at a press conference later that day, that is the last the prison guard saw of the man.

Police say Hagenkotter hopped the fence and left the prison wearing an orange jumpsuit, which he shed after he broke the perimeter. Schools were put on lockdown; neighbors were put on guard — and for nearly two weeks, Hagenkotter eluded police.

On Dec. 11, police found him dead in a Kensington warehouse, about six miles away from the site of his escape.

This latest incident is sure to heighten criticism of the city's "dangerous and degrading" prison system. But Philadelphia is not the only county on the hook.

You’d be hard-pressed to find many people in the region who have not seen security video showing Danilo Cavalcante escaping from Chester County Prison on Aug. 31. Video of the convicted murderer crab-walking up a prison wall in a narrow passageway got hundreds of thousands of views on social media and YouTube and instantly became an indelible image from the exhaustive two-week search for the 34-year-old, 5-foot-tall, 100-pound Brazilian national.

After scaling that wall, Cavalcante got onto the roof, pushed past razor wire fences, and was on his way. His escape went unnoticed for more than an hour.

Another incarcerated man, Igor Bolte, attempted escape in a similar way on May 19, but he was recaptured within minutes.

The search for Cavalcante started in lower Chester County, near Longwood Gardens, not far from the prison. He broke out of the search perimeter, stole a van and drove 30 miles north.

The ensuing manhunt included thermal imaging technology, drones, helicopters, dogs, hundreds of personnel from U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, ATF, the Pennsylvania State Police, the Chester County District Attorney’s Office, and municipal partners in Chester, Montgomery, Delaware and Bucks counties — and just for good measure, the recorded voice of Cavalcante’s mother.

Then a South Coventry Township resident tripped his own burglar alarm when he went out for a  cigarette. Authorities searching nearby moved in on the location. They did not find Cavalcante, but they were closer than ever. A thermal imaging drone flying through the area picked up a heat signal. They were able to pinpoint a possible location for the killer about a quarter-mile away, and tactical teams that converged on the position were able, on Sept. 13, to close the book on the two-week search the next morning without firing a single gunshot.

Additional razor wire was installed after Bolte escaped in May. Metal screening was added after Cavalcante’s escape. In addition, Chester County Prison has promised to fully enclose all eight yards, install more cameras and hire more people to watch them, improve their training programs and reinstate K-9 units at the prison.

About a half-hour away from where that search ended, and just a few days later, Pennsylvania State Police led another manhunt after nine teens broke out of a juvenile detention facility in Berks County. In this case, however, the Sept. 17 search was over in under 12 hours.

The teens overpowered two Abraxas Academy staffers, grabbed the keys and ran. Rain and cold slowed the teens and took the wind out of their sails. Four of them gave up four miles away from Abraxas after spending a few hours in the woods. Before sunrise on Sept. 17, they knocked on the door of a home nearby, and the homeowner called 911.

The search went on for the remaining five until a report of a stolen truck about an hour later drew police to their location, where they chased four of them down. The final teen was captured shortly afterward.

The teens, at Abraxas for various charges, including robbery and weapons violations, or for bad behavior at other facilities, face additional charges now for the escape.

Of the thousands of people incarcerated in Pennsylvania jails every month, there have been only 14 “actual escapes” — where a person successfully broke out of confinement — in the past eight years, according to a Spotlight PA analysis of data the jails self-report to the state’s Department of Corrections.

The vast majority of escapes are considered “walk-aways,” where someone leaves the jail for an approved reason, such as work release, and never returns. There were 557 walk-aways between 2015 and 2022, about 87% of all escapes.

Altogether, escapes from adult jails in Pennsylvania are down significantly from pre-pandemic years. The number of escapes dropped from 106 in 2019 to 27 in 2020. It increased to 43 last year.

Though escapes from secure settings like prisons and jails are serious, escapes themselves are rarely violent when in progress, nor are the fugitives likely to commit violence when in the community, said Jeff Mellow, a professor at the City University of New York who studies flights from correctional institutions.

“Even though everybody assumed that there would be violence during during [Cavalcante’s] time in the community and recapture, he did not engage in any violence during that time,” Mellow said, “which once again, supports our research that less than 10% of escapes are violent at the time of escape, and then it even goes further down from there post-escape and at the time of recapture.”

Escapes happen far less frequently now than in the past, Mellow added, because most facilities use cameras, facial recognition technology and infrared sensors to stop people from leaving . Successful breakouts usually stem from human error, he said, and the people who manage them are almost always caught.

“We found that approximately 92% to 95% were recaptured,” Mellow said.