James Moorhouse
US authorities have suggested that the men who escaped from a New Orleans prison on Friday could be 'frankly anywhere' after staging a jailbreak reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption.
Ten men managed to break free from the Orleans Justice Centre after digging a hole behind the toilet and scaling the fence, before sprinting across a highway into the night.
There can be some hefty sentences if you ever manage to break out of prison and you're captured, and that will likely be the case with the three men who have already been discovered, but the other seven violent inmates remain at large.
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It seems likely that there will be severe punishments for those involved within the prison, after Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson suggested that an escape without inside help would have been impossible.
She said: "It's almost impossible, not completely, but almost impossible for anybody to get out of this facility without help."
The men staged their escape when a lone guard left to get food and even left a message teasing the officers, writing 'to easy lol' on the wall above, which suggests that any grammatical lessons they might have been given in prison also clearly weren't up to scratch.
Surveillance footage then captured the men leaving through the front door of the prison and getting over the barbed wire fence using blankets, with officers somehow only realising that they were gone seven hours later, following a routine morning headcount.
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The men who escaped range from the ages of 19 to 42, and include some convicted murderers with a 'history of witness intimidation of citizens who were brave enough to speak up' according to Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the escape 'beyond unacceptable' and said local authorities waited too long to inform the public.
She also confirmed that she has reached out to neighbouring states to alert them about the escape because the inmates have now had plenty of time to get 'frankly anywhere across the country'.
The escape has been likened to The Shawshank Redemption after the film's main character Andy Dufresne built a tunnel from his cell over 19 years, before laundering money from banks to aid his escape, which allowed him to live out his life in Mexico as a free man.
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US authorities will be hoping that the inmates don't manage to escape as far as Mexico, and will be aiming to round them up as quickly as possible, after being somewhat embarrassed by the ease with which these criminals managed to break out.