Bars are designed to do one of two things: keep people in, or out. Gated community bars keep non-residents out. Jail and prison bars keep prisoners in -- or that’s the theory anyway. A rather skinny Tennessee prisoner instead, literally, slipped through those cell bars to escape.
Many jail and prison inmates have tried through the years --- some, though few, have succeeded—in escaping in many ways, including attempts to overtake security guards and dig their way out incarceration: a Tennessee prisoner's method may go down in history as the most creative and seemingly impossible method, by physically slipping through jail bars in order to discover freedom.
That "freedom" proved to be fairly short-lived: Tennessee law enforcement has now captured — or, rather, recaptured — the prison inmate whom had successfully escaped from the Haywood County Jail, by slipping through the cell's bars to freedom.
Kristopher Allen White, age 23, busted out of jail grounds at around 4:00 a.m. earlier this week, when sheriffs say that the prisoner "shimmied" through cell bars, then used prison-issued blankets to safely climb a (seriously) barbed-wire fence.
The craziest part about White’s actual escape: not a scratch or bruise on the escaped prisoner.
Perhaps jails had better bypass any future ideas of on-site yoga classes: White certainly doesn’t seem to be lacking in the flexibility department. He is skinny but doesn't appear to be thin to a point of unhealthy.
"It appears he [prisoner White] took his body and slipped through the bars of the cell," Sheriff Bond says. That part is still baffling jail staff and guards. Maybe White learned how to "unhinge" his jaw, like a snake, in order to narrow that head profile. Whatever the prisoner did, it apparently worked -- and worked well. Whatever the skinny prisoner’s method, if he’s got one ounce of entrepreneurialism to match that determination, White could have a fantastic future in the “how-to” field of teaching –one that could prove lucrative, along with a risk of ending himself back behind bars.
Haywood County Jail’s Sheriff Bond says the bars in the jail cell—where the skinny prisoner slipped through--were approximately four and a half inches apart. "I still can't picture that," he says of White’s jail escape. "It's beyond my imagination to know how he succeeded in [getting his body through] that."
Sheriff's investigators discovered White's jail clothes and a blanket about a mile and a half away, roadside—confirming the idea that someone picked up the escapee by car. As to why the prisoner was dumb enough to lay a "trail of crumbs", after being one of the very few to successfully escape from a jail or prison facility is a bit baffling.
Several of Sheriff White's associates phoned the sheriff's department, saying they had given White a ride—under the guise that White had been let out of jail, not that he’d escaped.
Unfortunately for White, the prisoner was back in custody in Brownsville, just 14 hours after the run began—refusing to address cameras but forced to receive some unsolicited advice to jail. Sheriff Bond’s advice: "Look at life good. It will be a while before you see it again.”
So how did the ‘dangerous’ man got himself incarcerated in the first place: White was initially incarcerated after being captured at the Mexican border, a suspect in several church burglaries in the Brownsville, Tennessee area.
And we wonder why our legal system, jails and prisons are overcrowded.