Was He a Nice Prisoner?

Tuesday, April 30, 13:22 — My sister texted me. Her kid's preschool sent an alert: a prisoner escaped from a nearby hospital in Philadelphia, and parents should be aware, but not concerned.

I texted back: “How’d he get out”?”

Followed by: “Well maybe he isn’t dangerous, maybe he’s a nice prisoner.”

As time went on, and the prisoner was captured, the question stuck with me, because it's really not that stupid. It's the first thing anyone wants to know. When you hear escaped prisoner, your brain immediately goes, how scared should I be right now? Which requires knowing, at minimum, what kind of person we're dealing with. Whether the threat is real. Whether the guy is a danger to society or just a guy who didn't want to go back to a shitty prison cell.

In other words: nice prisoner, or mean one?

The incident

Here is what we know.

On Tuesday morning, around 10:20am, police said a 26-year-old prisoner was being transferred from Penn Presbyterian Medical Center when he escaped.

What followed was nearly three hours of grown adults running around in tactical gear, breaking fences, hopping on top of garages, bringing out the K-9 unit, all for one man.

Not to mention, throughout the search, They had him three times. He kept getting away.

At 1:20 p.m., it was over. CBS News Philadelphia watched officers make the arrest.

Frank Morris, John and Clarence Anglin — Alcatraz, 1962. Three men spent months carving through a wall with spoons, built papier-mâché heads to fool guards, and paddled into San Francisco Bay on a raft made from raincoats. They were never found.

FBI case: still open. U.S. Marshals want list: active until 2026.

El Chapo — twice. Joaquín Guzmán escaped a maximum security prison in Mexico in 2001 — reportedly hidden in a laundry cart — and again in 2015 through a mile-long tunnel dug directly under his cell. He ran a cartel responsible for thousands of deaths.

Now serving life at ADX Florence, Colorado.

Richard Matt and David Sweat — Clinton Correctional, 2015. They bribed a prison worker, used power tools to cut through walls, and emerged through a manhole a block from the facility.

Sweat was recaptured. Matt was shot and killed.

Our Guy — West Powelton, Philadelphia, 2025. Slipped a transfer. Evaded police multiple times over three hours. Stopped at some point to have what a witness described as a brief, face-to-face interaction, as if they’d just run into each other at a bodega.

Officially captured at 1:20 p.m.

What the data says

If you plot public panic against recidivism risk, the two lines don’t match. Drug offenses, petty theft, fraud — the stuff that floods the system — spike an alarm without actually being dangerous to others. Meanwhile, genuinely high-risk cases (read: rapists) get released at the end of a sentence with no fanfare.

We’re scared of the wrong things at the wrong volume. “Escaped prisoner” does no sorting. It just tells you the system briefly lost track of someone — and leaves you to assume the worst.

What this is actually about

The result is a system that houses people who did very different things under the same label — prisoner — and then releases that label to the public with no further context.

Mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over 2 million people. A substantial portion of them, by any measure, Quadrant 1.

Not nice. Not mean. Just: people the system processed.

I don’t know the man, so I can’t really answer. I don’t know what his case looked like, or what those three hours of running meant to him. I don’t even know his name.

What I know is that he evaded drones and dogs and tactical gear multiple times, and was back in custody before the news cycle moved on.

Was he a nice prisoner, or a mean one?

It’s a dumb question. But it’s also the question every single person asked when they got that notification. Because “escaped prisoner” doesn’t tell you anything about whether to be afraid. It just tells you that the system briefly lost track of someone.

And the system loses track of a lot of people.

Some of them are dangerous. Some of them are not. The preschools don’t always know which is which — and honestly, neither does the system.

That’s the part worth being alarmed about.

Sources

“Alcatraz Escape.” Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI.gov, https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/alcatraz-escape.

“Alcatraz Escape of June 1962.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 30 Aug. 2017, https://www.britannica.com/event/Alcatraz-escape-of-June-1962.

“June 1962 Alcatraz Escape.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1962_Alcatraz_escape.

“A Genius, Two Brothers, and Fake Heads.” National Park Foundation, https://www.nationalparks.org/connect/blog/genius-two-brothers-and-fake-heads.

“El Chapo.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Chapo.

“Timeline of El Chapo’s Major Escapes and Captures.” Time, https://time.com/4173454/el-chapo-capture-escape-timeline/.

Botelho, Greg, and Holly Yan. “Witness Testifies He, El Chapo’s Wife and Sons Helped Coordinate Kingpin’s Last Prison Escape.” CNN, 24 Jan. 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/24/us/el-chapo-escape-wife-sons.

“2015 Clinton Correctional Facility Escape.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Clinton_Correctional_Facility_escape.

“Looking Back 10 Years at the Escape from Dannemora.” WAMC Northeast Public Radio, 13 June 2025, https://www.wamc.org/news/2025-06-13/looking-back-ten-years-at-the-escape-from-dannemora.

“Escaped Prisoner Arrested in Philadelphia After Hours-Long Manhunt.” CBS News Philadelphia, 2025.

“Mass Incarceration Trends.” The Sentencing Project, https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/.

“Incarceration in the United States.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States.