The history of south Indian jails, be it in Chennai, Vellore, Pallayamkottai or Bangalore, is replete with tales of great escape by prisoners. Many were recaptured while some got drowned in the moat or were subsequently caught while committing another crime. Criminals hardly change their ways and, in fact, become adept in newer methods of escape. The latest to escape from a Bangalore jail, which can’t be without the connivance of prison staff, can claim a record of sorts and can even get India an Olympic medal or two. He has displayed skills of a locksmith, high jumper or pole vaulter, ability to cross supposedly an electrified fence wearing gloves and descend from the tallest outer-most compound wall of about 30 feet. (He did not know the fence was dead at that time but he had gloves on).
Even his incarceration in a Coimbatore jail had not deterred him from indulging in more rapes after an escape. Charles Sobhraj escaped from Tihar on March 16, 1986, but was recaptured shortly thereafter, returned to the prison and sentenced to an additional ten years for the escape . The Bulletin of May 8, 1987, had carried a report about the great escape by two men from Madras jail in a very uncomplicated manner. Charles Wade Deveney, 23, and Reneso David Pineda, 19, serving their term for burglary and theft, who were out for exercise, walked up the stairs of the courthouse basement jail, and through the back door to freedom.
The exit doors from the courtroom had to be kept open under the fire fighting code and that helped them to give the slip. When I was in school I had heard of a “gentleman” of foreign origin using a hacksaw to cut the prison bars and swimming across the river outside Madras jail. He made big headlines.
Many prisons use security features such as motion sensors, CCTV, barred windows, high walls, barbed wire (or razor wire in some countries) and electric fencing to avert escapes. Any story of escape brings a big headache for prison guards. Not many jail birds are aware that escaping is a criminal offence and will result in time being added to the sentence, as well as the person being put under rigorous conditions.
Chennaites still remember details of gruesome murders by “Auto” Shankar and his group between 1987 and 1988. Shankar and his men were interrogated at Pallavaram police station before they were moved to the central prison, from where Shankar made a daring escape with the help of a woman. Three prisoners escaped from the high security Palayamkottai central prison in Tirunelveli, in June 2002, through the underground drainage system. Two score-plus suspected LTTE militants held at Vellore Fort, sometime in 1995, dug a 153 ft-long tunnel, swam across a 50 feet-wide moat, changed into dry clothes and disappeared. No one knows till date how the volume of earth dug out by them was disposed of. June 2013 saw two inmates escaping from Thiruvananthapuram jail after shedding their uniform and by using clothes which they had secretly hidden from the staff.