Holiday Exodus

GREAT BRITAIN

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.

-- Richard Lovelace

Centuries after the poet composed his lyric tribute to the jail-breaking qualities of young love, his words ring with a far more literal truth. "There is really no secure prison" in all of Britain, concluded a government committee headed by former First Lord of the Admiralty Earl Mountbatten. And Britain's prison ers seem determined to prove Mountbatten right. In the two weeks since the report was published, convicts have been crashing out at an embarrassing clip. At least 29 have taken what the British press ironically calls "Christmas leave."

Only on Christmas day, when the prisons were serving a holiday banquet, was there a pause in the exodus. One escapee even re-enacted a stunt from the Peter Sellers movie Two Way Stretch: he rode to freedom secreted in side a prison garbage truck, all the while desperately ducking the automatic arm that crushes the refuse. Lest would-be escapees lack so antic an imagination, the Mountbatten committee provided a few suggestions of its own. As it out lined weak points in the prison security system, it theorized about a whole range of potential escapes -- from prisoners scooped up by low-flying helicopters to space-age techniques in which an ac complice somehow supplies a back-borne jet pack that would enable a convict to clear the wall in one jump.

Letters from an Axman. The Mountbatten investigation was ordered when the Labor government came under at tack after the escape of Soviet Spy George Blake in October. Britain's Victorian prisons were not built for the liberal policies that today allow the inmates wide freedoms. "Most prisoners," said the report, "are kept in buildings that were constructed in the 19th century when, in effect, imprisonment was solitary confinement and all security depended on this fact."

Walls and bars are not enough, said the report. They must be augmented by such modern escape foilers as "electronic proximity detectors" installed atop prison walls and "Geophone Vibration detectors" buried outside to pick up the first errant footfall. Another gadget that appealed to the committee would virtually turn every cell into a weighing machine rigged to set off an alarm when a prisoner's poundage is missing.

The report urged removal of the 120 most dangerous criminals to a new prison planned for the Isle of Wight.

While the government totted up the high cost of such innovations, London bookies were laying odds on the daily escape total. Crowds flocked to the moors to watch search parties--and it was usually quite a show. On one manhunt, three platoons of British commandos each brought along a bagpiper. How the skirling would help catch the quarry, no one said. London newspapers printed letters from Frank Mitchell, 37, the so-called "mad axman of Broadmoor," who escaped last month and wanted it known that "I am sorry that my absence has caused certain people to think badly of men like Mr. Roy Jenkins." But all Home Secretary Jenkins could do was cut short his holiday and return to his office, determined to submit the Mountbatten recommendations to Parliament.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.