For those who followed the escape and eventual capture of the convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante over the past couple of weeks, you were in for a crime documentary playing out in real-time. From the crab-walking prowess that made the prison break possible, through the several near misses with the police, to the convict also being required to meet over Zoom with Brazilian prosecutors looking into a likely Cavalcante murder in their country (which he only narrowly escaped by forging his identity to emigrate to the US), this story had everything necessary for a Netflix special.
The story hit a little closer to home for me since I grew up near Chester County, Pennsylvania, where all of this went down. But moreover, it got me thinking — how common are prison breaks in this country? As many of you likely know, the United States, while being the land of the free, is home to the highest incarcerated population in the world (over two million prisoners) and furthermore has the highest rate of incarceration, with 629 prisoners per 100,000 people. Interestingly, Brazil, Cavalcante’s home country, has the third highest imprisoned population globally, with around 810,000 incarcerated.
The statistics above are 2021 numbers from the World Prison Brief — but they don’t stop there. You can indeed find out how many prison escapes there are in the United States every year by going to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) website. BJS collects data on federal and state prisons, but it should be noted that federal prisons are extremely hard to break out of due to the high-security measures taken there, so these escapes are pretty much all from state facilities.
However, the numbers are nonetheless high — 2,231 escapes occurred in 2019, for instance. These numbers are significantly down from the start of the century: in 2000, 5,168 inmates escaped. A huge disclaimer here: these statistics reflect that escapes happened, but they shouldn’t be taken to mean that there are thousands of prisoners still on the loose from when they broke out. In 1994, for example, a whopping 14,307 prisoners successfully escaped, but 13,346 of them were eventually recaptured.
That still means 961 illegal ex-cons evaded, but as a final bit of solace, note that New Jersey has a prison population of 12,506 as of 2021 – so if we scale things down and go by purse statistics, then only about 27 escapes would happen here annually, and maybe two of them at most wouldn’t get caught. I would hope those two were wrongly convicted of something like in a certain movie about a prison break (I won’t say the title so as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but my hint to find it is to start with the earliest year that I used in a statistic above).
These statistics are now all readily available on the Internet, and they were being collected even before, as BJS has existed since 1979 (go Jimmy Carter!). The truth is, there are 13 such “principal statistics agencies” in the US government, including other more famous ones like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. This reflects America’s long history of data collection and statistics studying, an important aspect of the country that has set precedents for many other nations that have their own statistics agencies or departments.
The even more important thing, though, is to use these statistics properly. The misuse or misrepresentation of statistics happens almost all the time in US politics, sometimes with disastrous consequences. We must always strive to avoid the mentality of authoritarians who have said “one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic,” and realize the human elements behind all these numbers. Statisticians should work not only to properly explain the results of their data collection, but also to prevent the “statistic-ation” of human prisoners, laborers, schoolchildren, and citizens.
