Six of the 10 inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail remain at large on Tuesday, with officials offering a $20,000 reward for information on each escapee.
Michael Harrigan, a retired FBI agent and partner at the Pax Group, said escapees are generally caught within a week; however, this case is far more complex than typical jailbreaks.
"Time provides the opportunity for subjects who have escaped to flee to greater, more remote locales. So it depends on whether these individuals had contacts out of state or out of the parish, whether they were able to move to a remote location, maybe staying with people that law enforcement still hasn't identified," Harrigan said.
Officials stated it took eight hours before law enforcement was notified of the jailbreak early Friday. Harrigan remarked that a plethora of failures contributed to the occurrence of such an escape.
"For a correctional facility to be breached from the inside, you have a door that's pulled off, to have a hole in the wall escaping to the hole, to go out onto a loading dock where surveillance cameras are active and then breach the climb over a fence and escape into the area," he said. "There's a whole plethora of failures here. And I think right at the beginning, the sheriff stepped up and took some responsibility for this when she indicated right away there could have been inside help here."
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The jailbreak highlights possible understaffing at the jail. Officials noted that a guard was getting food at the time of the incident, and no one else was able to monitor while that person was away.
"They were 40% understaffed there, which is significant," Harrigan said. "But as a whole, the correctional profession is a tough profession. It's probably one of the toughest professions within the field of law enforcement in the correctional chain, from arrest to incarceration. It's a tough job, and it's hard to staff these places fully. "But here, you have the potential for inside assistance, you have degradation of the actual building, and then you have the fact that somebody didn't even see them leaving."
Harrigan added that he would not be surprised to learn that the inmates had help from inside the facility.
"There's always the opportunity for escape, especially when someone's incarcerated and they have nothing but time on their hands," he said. "They can look at processes, they could look at rhythms, the guards, they could look at the facilities, look at the fine points of the locks and look for defects in the structure.
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"The sheriff stepping right up and saying that she felt there could not have been an escape without inside help gives us the strong indication that she knows that there's somebody inside that assisted here, because it's just personally, I couldn't see many correctional facilities where you could have somebody breached like this and go undetected for eight hours, especially such a large group of people."
