If you were an inmate inside the prison looking out through one of these larger windows, you would see two obstacles that prevented your escape to freedom: the transparent glass in the sealed window, and the perimeter chain-link fence with barbed wire stretched across the top. There were some inmates who didn’t think these obstacles were too difficult to overcome, and in October, two of them began watching us and planning, and they waited for an opportunity to act.

In October, the daylight begins to shorten. The yard is called in at 8:30 in the evening, and all the inmates return to their units, but they aren’t locked in their rooms. Instead, they’re watching TV, or visiting with neighbors, or getting ice or hot water. They’re coming to the office to get their evening meds and a host of other activities. It’s a busy time leading up to deadlock at 9:00 o’clock when everyone returns to their rooms and is locked inside until the next morning. When all the doors are secure, we conduct a formal deadlock count.

Between 8:30 and 9:00 in the evening in October, the sky is still fairly bright, but the ground is in deep shadows. It’s a perfect time to dash across no-man’s land and scale the perimeter fence without anyone noticing. At least that’s what Zachary and Kirby thought. One Saturday evening, when we called in the yard at 8:30, they carried a blanket into their Unit when they came in from the compound. Inside the blanket, they’d hidden a twenty-five pound weight. They’d taken it from the weight pile. The weight pile had a number of free weights, bars, stands, and benches that inmates used to develop and maintain their muscles. Zachary and Kirby noticed that no one counted the weights at this time of the day to insure they were all there, and on this evening, no one noticed the missing weight.

At least, that's what they thought.

By 8:40, the Unit was humming with activity, and Zachary and Kirby sent some confederates to the other side of the Unit to create a disturbance. They watched the office door for the caseworker on duty to leave the area and walk toward the far side of the Unit to investigate the unfamiliar noise, and when he was out of sight, it was time to act. They closed the pantry doors to muffle the loud sounds they intended to make, and then they tied the weight to the end of the blanket and began swinging it at the large window facing no-man’s land on the lower tier, repeatedly striking it.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The window shuddered with each blow. Before very many strikes, the window popped out of its frame and dropped to the ground in no-man’s land. Zachary and Kirby were scared and excited. There was only one more barrier to overcome. The perimeter fence beckoned to them in the gathering twilight.

One-by-one, they gathered the items they wanted to take with them, and they jumped through the window onto the ground a short distance below. Unfortunately for them, security officers were waiting for them out of sight on either side of the window, and as soon as they landed on the ground, their feet went out from under them, and they found themselves tied up in flex cuff restraints and lying face down on the cold ground. To the officers, they looked like spring calves tied up waiting to be branded.

The officers waited to see if any other inmates were going to come through the window, and when no one else appeared, they climbed into the Unit through the open window and directed the inmates who were watching the action to lock down in their rooms. Zachary and Kirby spent this night in the Control Unit, and by the following week’s end, they were both facing new felony charges in a downtown courtroom for escape.

When we have a critical incident at the prison, we review all the details of it with a goal of finding ways to prevent similar incidents in the future, so we ask some questions. What led Zachary and Kirby to decide to escape? What had they noticed? Was our response adequate? Was there anything we did to make the incident worse or more dangerous? What could we have done differently?

The review of this attempted escape found that the intelligence gathering from the green Incident Reports, which staff had been submitting, was excellent. It was so good that officers could station themselves outside the window when the escape was about to occur and stop it. But it was also good enough that they could easily have prevented it from happening at all. They also never informed the caseworker on duty that an escape was planned in his Unit that evening. The caseworker was lucky that he hadn’t stumbled upon it and tried to stop it. He could have been hurt while officers hiding just outside the sealed window would have been unable to help him.

The critical incident reviews resulted in several action steps. We installed reinforcement on all the large windows facing no-man’s land including the addition of bars. We installed an additional fence with special sensors that would alert officers in Central Control of anyone getting near the perimeter fence. We began counting the weights on the weight pile several times a day to make sure no one had taken any of them into the units. Finally, there would be no more heroic captures of escaping inmates. If we believed someone was going to escape, we would lock him up in Segregation to prevent it.

It had been an exciting night, but the drama probably wasn’t over. We were warned to expect more incidents, and once again, we didn’t have to wait very long for one to occur.

It was now November, and the weather was warm, at least during the day. The new prison was functioning well, and we were able to successfully address issues that occasionally arose. I was working on second shift on a Wednesday, and after dinner, we opened the Unit and let the inmates freely come and go in and out of the Unit. They could also leave the Unit and go to the Inside Compound if they wished.

The Inside Compound was an area of grass, asphalt, and concrete that contained basketball courts, a tennis court, a rudimentary miniature golf course, picnic tables, and the weight pile. It was completely surrounded by the housing units and the building where the school and administrative offices were located. On this warm evening, as winter approached, there were many inmates milling around in this exercise area, but apparently, all was not well. There were some complaints, and there was also conversation about the recent sit-down strike that the inmates had carried out the previous summer.

Inmates began to gather into groups, and the groups quickly began to grow. Other inmates began to stream out of the housing units to see what was going on, and they remembered the recent broiling summer day and the drama, excitement, and power they had felt when they all sat down and no one in management knew what to do. Suddenly, just as it had happened four months earlier, the inmates sat down en masse again. This time, on the Inside Compound.

What did the inmates want? What did they plan to do with this beautiful new prison?

The same leaders as before asked to speak to someone in authority, and they disappeared inside the administrative area. They emerged some time later as it was beginning to get dark, but I never learned what they had discussed.

The minutes ticked away, and the time arrived to call in the inmates and close the Inside Compound for the night. We announced it on the loudspeakers, and a few inmates came in, but most remained outside and ignored the order.

“Lock the outside doors and close the gate,” my supervisor said. We conducted our nine o’clock deadlock count and noted the inmates who were missing. Then we waited. Ten o’clock arrived, and we were not allowed to leave. We would stay until the emergency was resolved.

Outside, the temperature was dropping fast, and the inmates were starting to get pretty cold. The little available trash to burn in the trash barrels was quickly consumed, and people began to miss the warmth of their beds. The clear sky and the twinkling stars hastened the falling temperatures, and inmates thought regretfully about the jackets and gloves they had not thought to bring with them. Above them, on the roofs of the school and on some of the housing units, guards armed with rifles could be seen looking down on them. Would there be shooting tonight? Would inmates die tonight?

No one knew.

Midnight arrived. I’d called my wife and told her of the emergency and warned her that I did not know when I would get home. One o’clock arrived, and inmates could be seen huddling together for warmth. A single blanket had appeared among the inmates, and several inmates had crowded under it hoping for relief from the frigid breeze. We worried that the inmates would soon discover the weight pile and use the solid iron bars and weights to break through into the school, attack staff, and do great damage. But as the night wore on, and the inmates got colder and colder, their destructive tendencies seemed to disappear.

Finally, about two o’clock in the morning, they broke ranks and dispersed to the gates of their housing units. They asked to be let in. There had been no violence, and no one had gotten hurt. The inmates from our Unit crowded at the gate under the bright lights that bathed the area and illuminated their warm, moist breath as it rose in puffs of condensation from their mouths and noses when it met the cold dry air. They stamped their feet against the pavement and shivered violently with worsening hypothermia.

We brought them in one at a time and strip searched them before we allowed them to go to their rooms. Their exposed flesh displayed large goosebumps that stood their body hair straight out. It reminded me of ostrich skin. No one objected to the strip searches. They were anxious to crawl into their warm beds.

By three o’clock in the morning, everyone was off the yard and locked in their rooms. We conducted a deadlock count, and when it cleared, we went home. The excitement was all over.

The critical incident review of this event found that the inmates had learned a new lesson about the usefulness of mass protests, especially sit-down strikes. The only result for them was hypothermia. We also remembered that the weight pile was on the Inside Compound, and it offered ready access to some pretty formidable weapons. We moved the weight pile from the Inside Compound to the Big Yard.

The Big Yard was a field outside the housing units and inside the perimeter fence. Our laundry was located on one side of the Big Yard, and we had marked off a football field and a baseball field in the area. Circling the football field was an oval track although a better description of it might be a path in the dirt. Inmates used it to walk or jog to keep in shape and to get in their steps. The Big Yard was only accessible to inmates during the day and when the weather was pleasant.

It had been an eventful fall, and we correctly guessed that winter would calm things down considerably, but spring follows winter, and with it came new drama.

We had finished reinforcing all the windows facing no-man’s land, and we had installed a new fence with motion sensors near the perimeter fence. But the new prison was proving to be considerably more expensive to operate compared to the old Men’s Reformatory. One day, management announced a new cost-saving measure they would soon implement. They would remove the officers from the guard towers and replace them with a single officer who would slowly drive a state vehicle from place to place around the perimeter fence. From time to time the officer would park his vehicle and watch no-man’s land.

There was an immediate outcry. Security officers insisted that guard towers were needed. They warned of an increase in escape attempts if we implemented the new policy. Apparently, inmates also learned of the proposed change, but they didn’t object, and at least two of them began to make plans.

On the morning of the first day of the new change, when the guard towers would be empty, we heard gunfire. Sharp cracks echoed off the walls of the housing units in rapid succession, and everyone stopped dead in their tracks and looked around to see if they were in any danger. Most of the inmates were not in danger, but the two inmates who had sprinted across no-man’s land, leapt over the first fence and were now climbing the perimeter fence, were in great danger.

A nearby tower officer had warned them to stop with a single rifle shot into the dirt at the base of his tower. When that didn’t stop them, and they started climbing the fence, he began firing at them. They were not an easy target, but he kept firing at them until they were off the fence. That was his assignment. If they fell back inside, then officers would soon arrive to remove them. If they successfully made it over the top of the fence, dropped to the other side, and started to run, he also had to stop firing. Capturing them would become a policing problem, and we would depend upon the local police force and the Nebraska State Patrol to accomplish it. Tower officers were trained to never fire their weapons at a target outside the perimeter fence.

The two escaping inmates did not make it over the fence, but they didn’t die. One of the two, a young, slender, athletic inmate named Fred did take a bullet in the leg. The other inmate, whose name I never learned, gave up the attempt when Fred was hit, and he stood by his wounded friend and waited for security officers to arrive. (Wounded in the leg . . . I remembered Phoebe mentioning something about that at the Training Academy.)

I next saw Fred several months later. I passed him walking in a hallway. The leg that had been hit with a rifle shot was deformed, and much of the muscle had atrophied. He used a cane, and he walked with some difficulty. As I watched him, I thought of how one day’s excitement had resulted in a barely-useful leg that would now change the rest of his life. He was no longer an athletic young man. Still, I was surprised to see that he was in good spirits. Apparently, he had gained some notoriety among the prisoners for his escape attempt, and he basked in the recognition. It was a steep price to pay.

Incident Reports submitted by staff and fitted together by the managers had revealed an escape plan that was taking shape, and on the day the new policy was to begin that removed officers from the towers, they changed course. They sent officers back out to the towers, and when the escape attempt began, the tower officer was in position, armed with a rifle, and ready to act. Just as his training at the Academy had taught him, he shot center-mass over and over again until the inmates were off the fence. At least, those were his instructions.

The critical incident review carried out after the emergency noted that the tower officers served as an important deterrent to escape attempts, and the plan to remove them was abandoned. It also noted that the inmates believed they had a chance to successfully climb over the fence, so the authors of the review recommended installing Concertina razor wire to make the perimeter fence a more formidable obstacle. By the end of the summer, vast strands of loosely looping Concertina razor wire had been installed along the top of the perimeter fence and along the inside-facing surface of the fence. When it was completed, the perimeter fence looked like a tangle of deadly razor wire that offered no opportunity to climb through. The inmates noticed the change. Fred was the last inmate to ever try to scale the perimeter fence.

Summer was fading fast, and we soon celebrated our first-year anniversary. We had opened the new prison in the late summer of the previous year with a sit-down strike to get things started. Fall had brought an escape attempt and another sit-down strike. Spring had brought another escape attempt and the shooting of Fred as he tried to climb the perimeter fence. It was now summer again, and it was fading fast. We celebrated our first-year anniversary in August. We had been open one full year. It was an anniversary of both relief and determination. Our prison was running smoothly. We had been tested, and thankfully, we had passed the tests. We were now veterans.

Discussion

1. Do you think critical incident reviews would be helpful in personal relationships?

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