The unnamed woman had been arrested and was being released on June 5 at around 8 a.m., when she failed to follow instructions on how to exit the St. Louis Justice Center, Commissioner Dale Glass told the Post-Dispatch.
Glass said jail staff told her: “Go down the hall to the elevator. Go down to the first floor, make a right turn.”
But after going into the elevator and pushing all the buttons, she ended up on the fifth floor, where she walked through a fire exit door—which can only be unlocked by staff or from the outside—becoming trapped in the stairwell.
The door alarm on that floor had been disabled, and although staff heard the noises she made, Glass said, they could not locate the source.
Finally, on June 7 at around 6 p.m., they spotted her peering through the window of one of the doors.
Glass said the jail has since changed their protocols.
Faxing Their Way Out of Jail
In May, a woman was jailed for 15 years for helping spring her boyfriend from an Arizona jail by posing as a sheriff’s deputy. Maxine Feldstein, 30, was sentenced after pleading guilty to forgery, third-degree escape, and second-degree criminal impersonation.According to the Northwest Arkansas Gazette, Feldstein managed to free her boyfriend from a Washington County jail with nothing but a phone call and a follow-up email to which she attached an “authentic-looking form.”
But her boyfriend, Nicholas Lowe, remained in jail, on hold from Ventura County Sheriff’s Office in California for false impersonation.
But Lowe had a plan.
Identifying herself as “Deputy Kershaw with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office,” Feldstein called the jail July 27, persuading the on-duty deputy that Lowe was to be released as Ventura County jail was overcrowded.
Feldstein claimed to have sent a fax with an official release form. When the deputy said he had not received the fax, she sent him an “authentic-looking form” via email, releasing Ventura County’s hold, according to the affidavit cited by KFSM.
The plan worked—until the couple were both captured less than three weeks later in Fayetteville and found themselves once again in a county jail.
3 Percent of Inmates
According to analysis from three national databases over an 11-year period, about 3 percent of all inmates escape from prison at some time while serving their sentence.
However, the vast majority of escapes—88 percent—were from low-security level prisons.
“Among escapees from the more secure prisons, more than 92 percent are captured and returned to prison within a year of escaping,” according to the report.
The report notes that escape rates have dropped with the rising incarceration rate in recent decades—a decline that still continues, according to more recent reports.
The decline is attributed to improved security of new prisons, the gradual aging of the correctional population, and a drop in the number of property offenders whose skills on breaking into buildings easily convert to the skills for breaking out.
