It doesn’t take a particularly long time to scour the web for stories of escapes from prison. There’s the famous story of the men who (may or may not have actually) escaped from infamous Alcatraz island prison by patching together a makeshift liferaft from rain jackets. Notorious Mexican drug cartel kingpin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from prison not once, but twice, through both a shower tunnel and a laundry cart. And then there is, of course, the famous case of Lincoln Burrows, who escaped from Fox River State Penitentiary by tunneling his way out, avoiding execution entirely.
If you’re not overly familiar with the name Lincoln Burrows, his escape, or Fox River State Penitentiary, that may be because they’re all fictional, having been portrayed on the Fox hit “Prison Break.”
As far as prison television shows go, Prison Break is an interesting one, given that large portions of the show take place outside of a prison. Despite this, it’s still worth examining to determine how realistic the scenarios presented on the show are, from incarceration to breaking out of a prison.
The escape presented on the Fox drama wasn’t necessarily completely unrealistic–tunneling out of prison is a method that has been used in cases such as the El Chapo escape above and numerous others in similar vein. However prison escapes as a whole are fairly uncommon, and the events leading up to the escape pulled by Burrows aren’t as realistic as viewers may have assumed.
In modern times, it’s harder to break out of prison than it ever has been in the past. It doesn’t take much to understand why: as we advance as a society, so do our technologies. With the advent of closed-circuit monitoring and a better understanding of how escapes have happened in the past, prison escapes have been becoming less and less common as time goes on. According to Slate, the roughly 2,500 successful escapes from prison in 2008 are about one sixth as common as they were in 1993, even with a considerably larger prison population.
Even before the escape, though, some dubious actions take place that bring into question how realistic Prison Break is. To start, Lincoln Burrows is able to escape thanks to his brother, Michael Scofield, who is imprisoned with him. While there are no laws or stringently followed rules surrounding imprisoning siblings together, Burrows’ standing as a death-row inmate brought up on charges of killing the Vice-President may have merited isolation from anyone with whom he could conspire to escape.
Upon his arrival, Michael is able to help get his brother out of solitary confinement on death row and into the team of inmates who perform maintenance on things that include repairs–which would allow Burrows access to tools and potential alone time he could (and eventually would) use to facilitate his escape. Removing a prisoner from solitary confinement, particularly one who is facing execution, to give him rights to work around the prison is a bit of a stretch.
However, as with most prison-based television shows, there are doses of reality. The prison experience is often marred by systemic and difficult to control bouts of violence. Inconsistencies, including the frequency of conjugal visits and the bouts of inexplicable luck that the brothers on Prison Break face have been pointed out in the past (not to mention the tattoo that Michael sports, which would have cost in the realm of $20,000 and could not be done quickly). While Prison Break may not be a perfectly accurate television show about prison life, it does give an interesting look behind bars, as it was filmed in a real-life (now closed) correctional facility.