Nowhere to run: Looking back at a prison escape
HEATHER SACKETT, News Staff Writer
Editor’s note: The end of the year usually has people looking back at the course of the past 12 months and lots of newspapers publish a Year in Review special, such as the one inserted in this week’s Lake Placid News. This week also includes a story that revisits an escape from the Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution in 1982, the idea for which came when some old photos of law enforcement officials with bloodhounds and the search effort were found in the News archives. The prisoner was eventually captured in Lake Placid.
Prison officials kindly put the Lake Placid News in touch with someone who worked at the prison at the time of the escape to give us a first-hand account of the incident.
LAKE PLACID — When convicted murderer Barrington Stephens escaped from the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ray Brook in 1982, law enforcement officials, tracking dogs and local residents, aided by the rugged and harsh Adirondack landscape, returned him quickly to justice.
According to the Lake Placid News report, Stephens escaped on the night of Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1982 and was apprehended three days later in Lake Placid on the morning of Friday, Oct. 1, 1982. The Jamaican resident was serving a six-month sentence at Ray Brook for illegal re-entrance. But he was scheduled to be released to state authorities on Oct. 1 to serve a sentence of 25 years to life for second degree murder and second degree criminal possession of a weapon.
At the time, prison officials did not provide information about how Stephens breached security, but according to retired corrections officer Joe Smith, Stephens simply scaled the perimeter fence.
“He beat the system,” Smith said. “It was a double fence, maybe 10 feet high, with razor wire at the top of it. It’s not easy. I’ve seen people attempt it and get caught up in the razor wire. It’s treacherous stuff.”
Smith, 56, retired from corrections three years ago as warden at the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. and currently lives in Florida. Smith worked at 12 different corrections institutions across the country, starting at a facility in Missouri in 1975.
He moved to Ray Brook in 1982 not long after the prison opened and spent two-and-a-half years there as a senior officer specialist. He recently returned to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the opening.
“It was probably one of the most difficult areas to escape from,” Smith said. “The location, the climate were prohibitive of someone getting away. It’s a small and close knit community, and people quickly recognized someone who was an outsider.”
Northern New York is home to several prisons, all within a relatively small geographical area. For the most part, correctional institutions and the local communities they inhabit have a symbiotic relationship. Prisons provide good-paying jobs in a place where few exist and, in return, most local residents welcome the institutions as part of their communities.
The Lake Placid News story about the escape details the movement of officers and bloodhounds over the three days, tracking the inmate along the four miles of railroad track from Ray Brook to Lake Placid. But according to Smith, the process also included securing the facility and calling in help from the state police, as well as local residents. He said escape sirens were used to let people in the immediate area know there was a disturbance. There were also road blocks and trunk searches.
“I remember fliers going out just very quickly, within an hour,” Smith said. “You do want to make (residents) aware. We went door to door locally and notified people.”
As soon as corrections officers realized there had been a breach of security, everyone went into crisis mode, following a protocol that has been planned out for just such an occasion.
“It becomes a mission,” Smith said. “Everything goes to a heightened awareness.”
Former Department of Corrections Lt. Bill Minogue, who also is a co-owner of the Firehouse Deli in Lake Placid, was employed as a corrections officer for more than 25 years at prisons throughout the state, including New York City, Dannemora and Sing Sing. Minogue said, once a prisoner escapes, the convict is usually more dangerous than he was before, as he is now at a heightened stage of panic.
“Anything can happen,” Minogue said. “He is much more desperate, and we don’t know his frame of mind. You have no idea as to the reason for the inmate’s escape. Was it spur of the moment or was it planned?”
He said, following the news that a prisoner has escaped, the prison quickly moves ahead with its game plan to track them. He said officers usually work 16 to 18 hours straight until the escapee has been apprehended.
When an inmate escapes from Ray Brook, or any of the other facilities in northern New York, it may seem like there is no chance of finding them in the vast wilderness. With six million acres of forest land to hide in, it seems likely an inmate would just disappear into the woods. But Smith said this was not the case.
“For someone born and raised in the inner city their whole lives, it’s not an appealing area for anybody to get out of,” Smith said. “He was happy to be found. He was cold and hungry. Incarceration didn’t look so bad after that.”
After police had tracked Stephens to an area near the Lake Placid Airport, scrambling through brush, following the bloodhounds into wetlands and across the river, he was finally captured near the Lake Placid Rod and Gun Club on River Road on Friday morning. He had made it just six miles in his two-and-a-half days on the run. He was arrested without incident.
Once captured, an acute sense of relief is felt by corrections officers and all those involved in the search.
“There’s immense relief,” Minogue said. But after the escaped convict returns to prison, guards must go out of their way to protect them, he added.
“They must be protected from other inmates, the public and staff,” he said, adding that it can be easy to accuse a guard of acting in retribution for the escape. “After being captured, they must be treated with kid gloves.”
Smith said that in urban areas, it’s much harder to find an escapee.
“Working in downtown Chicago and Metro Correctional in Philly, if someone gets out of your custody there, they tend to just fade into the background,” he said. “You have a number of false leads in a denser population.”
These days, Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution, which was built to house athletes from Lake Placid’s 1980 Olympic Winter Games, houses about 1,235 inmates with an average sentence length of 130 months, according to warden Deborah Schult. Most of them are from the Northeastern U.S. and nearly half are serving sentences for drug-related offenses. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has four security levels: minimum, low, medium and high. Ray Brook remains a medium-security facility.
Schult, in a letter to the Lake Placid News, said that because of security concerns, she couldn’t provide much information about specific security features used in preventing escapes and apprehending escapees. She did say there are five official “inmate counts” per day, as well as additional counts by the inmates’ work supervisors.
But the most effective security measure, Smith said, is the knowledge that if an inmate escapes, more time will be tacked onto their sentence. More common than breaking out of a secure facility, Smith said, is simply walking away during an outside work detail.
“They say the minimum fence around (a facility) is five years high,” Smith said. “That’s part of the responsibility. You have more freedom, but if you abuse that, you aren’t going to get that chance again. You will be placed at a higher security place.”
What Smith said he remembers most vividly about the incident was the way the community willingly participated and cooperated in helping to find the escapee. He also noted that the local Adirondack communities supported prisons at a time when not many communities in the Northeast wanted them in their area.
“I don’t remember any ill will or feelings,” he said. “I had seen local communities campaigning strongly to get prisons into the area because they provide jobs in a clean industry. I remember in Vermont the community came out in droves against them. Over the last few years, a number of facilities have been closed and it’s funny how hard people fight to keep them. I think today most communities see it as a good industry to have in their area.”
According to Schult, Stephens completed his sentence in September 1989 and was released to the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Lake Placid News Editor Richard Rosentreter
contributed
to this report.
POSTED: December 24, 2008
Photos
Prison officials kindly put the Lake Placid News in touch with someone who worked at the prison at the time of the escape to give us a first-hand account of the incident.
LAKE PLACID — When convicted murderer Barrington Stephens escaped from the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ray Brook in 1982, law enforcement officials, tracking dogs and local residents, aided by the rugged and harsh Adirondack landscape, returned him quickly to justice.
According to the Lake Placid News report, Stephens escaped on the night of Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1982 and was apprehended three days later in Lake Placid on the morning of Friday, Oct. 1, 1982. The Jamaican resident was serving a six-month sentence at Ray Brook for illegal re-entrance. But he was scheduled to be released to state authorities on Oct. 1 to serve a sentence of 25 years to life for second degree murder and second degree criminal possession of a weapon.
At the time, prison officials did not provide information about how Stephens breached security, but according to retired corrections officer Joe Smith, Stephens simply scaled the perimeter fence.
“He beat the system,” Smith said. “It was a double fence, maybe 10 feet high, with razor wire at the top of it. It’s not easy. I’ve seen people attempt it and get caught up in the razor wire. It’s treacherous stuff.”
Smith, 56, retired from corrections three years ago as warden at the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. and currently lives in Florida. Smith worked at 12 different corrections institutions across the country, starting at a facility in Missouri in 1975.
He moved to Ray Brook in 1982 not long after the prison opened and spent two-and-a-half years there as a senior officer specialist. He recently returned to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the opening.
“It was probably one of the most difficult areas to escape from,” Smith said. “The location, the climate were prohibitive of someone getting away. It’s a small and close knit community, and people quickly recognized someone who was an outsider.”
Northern New York is home to several prisons, all within a relatively small geographical area. For the most part, correctional institutions and the local communities they inhabit have a symbiotic relationship. Prisons provide good-paying jobs in a place where few exist and, in return, most local residents welcome the institutions as part of their communities.
The Lake Placid News story about the escape details the movement of officers and bloodhounds over the three days, tracking the inmate along the four miles of railroad track from Ray Brook to Lake Placid. But according to Smith, the process also included securing the facility and calling in help from the state police, as well as local residents. He said escape sirens were used to let people in the immediate area know there was a disturbance. There were also road blocks and trunk searches.
“I remember fliers going out just very quickly, within an hour,” Smith said. “You do want to make (residents) aware. We went door to door locally and notified people.”
As soon as corrections officers realized there had been a breach of security, everyone went into crisis mode, following a protocol that has been planned out for just such an occasion.
“It becomes a mission,” Smith said. “Everything goes to a heightened awareness.”
Former Department of Corrections Lt. Bill Minogue, who also is a co-owner of the Firehouse Deli in Lake Placid, was employed as a corrections officer for more than 25 years at prisons throughout the state, including New York City, Dannemora and Sing Sing. Minogue said, once a prisoner escapes, the convict is usually more dangerous than he was before, as he is now at a heightened stage of panic.
“Anything can happen,” Minogue said. “He is much more desperate, and we don’t know his frame of mind. You have no idea as to the reason for the inmate’s escape. Was it spur of the moment or was it planned?”
He said, following the news that a prisoner has escaped, the prison quickly moves ahead with its game plan to track them. He said officers usually work 16 to 18 hours straight until the escapee has been apprehended.
When an inmate escapes from Ray Brook, or any of the other facilities in northern New York, it may seem like there is no chance of finding them in the vast wilderness. With six million acres of forest land to hide in, it seems likely an inmate would just disappear into the woods. But Smith said this was not the case.
“For someone born and raised in the inner city their whole lives, it’s not an appealing area for anybody to get out of,” Smith said. “He was happy to be found. He was cold and hungry. Incarceration didn’t look so bad after that.”
After police had tracked Stephens to an area near the Lake Placid Airport, scrambling through brush, following the bloodhounds into wetlands and across the river, he was finally captured near the Lake Placid Rod and Gun Club on River Road on Friday morning. He had made it just six miles in his two-and-a-half days on the run. He was arrested without incident.
Once captured, an acute sense of relief is felt by corrections officers and all those involved in the search.
“There’s immense relief,” Minogue said. But after the escaped convict returns to prison, guards must go out of their way to protect them, he added.
“They must be protected from other inmates, the public and staff,” he said, adding that it can be easy to accuse a guard of acting in retribution for the escape. “After being captured, they must be treated with kid gloves.”
Smith said that in urban areas, it’s much harder to find an escapee.
“Working in downtown Chicago and Metro Correctional in Philly, if someone gets out of your custody there, they tend to just fade into the background,” he said. “You have a number of false leads in a denser population.”
These days, Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution, which was built to house athletes from Lake Placid’s 1980 Olympic Winter Games, houses about 1,235 inmates with an average sentence length of 130 months, according to warden Deborah Schult. Most of them are from the Northeastern U.S. and nearly half are serving sentences for drug-related offenses. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has four security levels: minimum, low, medium and high. Ray Brook remains a medium-security facility.
Schult, in a letter to the Lake Placid News, said that because of security concerns, she couldn’t provide much information about specific security features used in preventing escapes and apprehending escapees. She did say there are five official “inmate counts” per day, as well as additional counts by the inmates’ work supervisors.
But the most effective security measure, Smith said, is the knowledge that if an inmate escapes, more time will be tacked onto their sentence. More common than breaking out of a secure facility, Smith said, is simply walking away during an outside work detail.
“They say the minimum fence around (a facility) is five years high,” Smith said. “That’s part of the responsibility. You have more freedom, but if you abuse that, you aren’t going to get that chance again. You will be placed at a higher security place.”
What Smith said he remembers most vividly about the incident was the way the community willingly participated and cooperated in helping to find the escapee. He also noted that the local Adirondack communities supported prisons at a time when not many communities in the Northeast wanted them in their area.
“I don’t remember any ill will or feelings,” he said. “I had seen local communities campaigning strongly to get prisons into the area because they provide jobs in a clean industry. I remember in Vermont the community came out in droves against them. Over the last few years, a number of facilities have been closed and it’s funny how hard people fight to keep them. I think today most communities see it as a good industry to have in their area.”
According to Schult, Stephens completed his sentence in September 1989 and was released to the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Lake Placid News Editor Richard Rosentreter
contributed
to this report.
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