I drove six and a half hours to see my son this week. They are keeping him in the middle of nowhere, beyond a 550,000-acre national forest— two hours past an interstate exit and an hour past a gas station.
Limited availability meant that we only got an evening visit, so I pulled into the parking lot at dusk in a cold rain, my bladder bursting.
Walking across the pavement, I could see dozens of little orange stocking hats bobbing in the distance behind the fences. The temperature has dropped significantly since my last visit, and they’ve transformed themselves into bright-headed birds— walking in circles with their clipped wings.
That night in the visiting room, my son and I talked about the fences around the jailbirds who might get an idea to try and fly. ‘You might make it over one, if you were really prepared and damn lucky,’ my son said, ‘but there’s no way you get over the next three. We aren’t going anywhere.’
As a kid in the '80s, I remember worrying myself a great deal about those ‘Prison Area— Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers’ signs. I imagined it was a common occurrence that an escaped convict slunk out from behind the trees with a hobo knapsack over his shoulder. It might also have been the familiar, haunting tenor of Robert Stack or the crazed urgency of John Walsh's voice that trained me on words like ‘fugitive.’
Never mind that less than 0.4% of incarcerated people escape annually, and nearly all of them are recaptured within hours or days— alone and hungry.1 Headlines leave out that the vast majority of escapes occur from minimum-security or work-release centers— not the high-walled, dystopian facilities like my son’s. In fact, our state has not had a prison escape since 2014 (and that guy was re-captured in less than 24 hours).
It never dawned on me, until they drove my son into the middle of nowhere, that the Department of Corrections must have one hell of a sales team.
How else do you get small American towns to donate hundreds of acres of pristine, untouched land in trade for miles of unsightly razor wire? Who wants creepy warning signs up and down their quiet country roads?