The Sociology of Escape

February 7th, 2008 Posted in Escape

On December 17, 1975 at 2.06 PM in Mexico City, Dwight Worker, an American from Indiana in his mid-twenties then, dressed as a woman and, for the moment accepting the persona of this gender, steps through one of the out-going gates of the infamous Lecumberri Prison onto the public street and for the first time in two years is free though now a fugitive. He claims to be the first and only one to escape this dreaded jail since Pancho Villa set the standard decades before. His book of 1977, simply titled “Escape,” co-written with his wife Barbara, describes his adventure, a story of entrepreneurial persistence in spite of deep anxiety that for me marks it as a high point for the human spirit, something akin to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reaching for the summit of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953. I say this even though Worker was an admitted small potato drug dealer in prison in the first place because he attempted to transport cocaine across Mexico into the United States. But on occasion, escape is so unlikely and so dangerous and at the same time a beatific exemplar of the independent human will in action that one has to applaud regardless of other considerations. Escape itself is the attraction. Who looking out through the forbidden exit does not empathize?

Immediately we have to confront a moral dilemma. The prisoner may be a moral cretin, someone who should be confined, whose crimes and intentions are devilish and whose danger and threat to the rest of us is palpable and real. Yet his escape, a fearful nightmare for those on the side of the angels, takes the same pattern and involves the same process as the escapes of our heroes incarcerated by our national enemies. It is a contradiction that none of us can escape. It is one of the elements that limit the possibility of a scientific sociology. (See our earlier posts #4 and #5 for a critique of scientific sociology.)

Escape attempts that fail are rarely memorialized. That’s the trick: ignoring all the poor bastards who are left in the soup; who remain at best in an inconvenient situation now made worse by additional punishment. Some are lost in anonymous isolation, or killed, even executed, in the dash for freedom. The escape stories work back from the successes. The narrative is in the getting away. Sometimes the escapee in telling his own tale will describe his fallen comrades who made but never completed the run. They exist as empty aches.

There is no complete definition of the place, thing, person, situation, idea which we may want either to avoid or to depart from once caught. Metaphorically we are locked in. There is a resistance to our leaving. The start of escape is in knowing the truth of this oppressive situation and wanting, with clarity, to get out from under. Sometimes the holds and locks are multiple and draconian, even literally impossible to break or evade. But if the holding pattern (the restriction) is weak it can simply be a matter of perception–to see and turn away. After one is out a second moment kicks in, the problem of what to do next. This is the general question that haunts us all. The throwing off the constraints that chaff us and then in freedom, in self-possession, to find the necessary personal and social autonomy to use what we have gained with some satisfaction.

The escape concept is broad enough to include not being captured in the first place. The out-versus-the-in is the encompassing mosaic. The wild animal is born free and when captured is transported to the zoo. Human culture is imposed upon him. But we humans accept cultural limits voluntarily. It is part of our biological fate. The pinch for us comes when the negation goes beyond what we can subjectively accept. It is when limit and constraint are refused that escape becomes possible or even necessary. In a world of accepted limits we have tranquility and no inclination to depart.

Escape is not the only way. There are alternatives. Revolt directs the act of liberation against agents of supposed oppression. There is no guarantee that either revolt or escape will occur. Acquiescence is the more usual road. Grin and bear it. Make the best of a bad situation. Learn to live with it. Do your time. But the limit that is accepted can, conversely, assure security. Objectively the imposition of limit might be real and have real consequences but subjectively this might be experienced as a requirement of freedom. Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” argues this as an essential consequence of our moral consensus, cultural unity, and psychic governance.

The individual versus the group action is a recurrent theme in sociology–egoism versus altruism. The person breaking out on his own usually leaves the restrictive order intact. It is a form of social mobility. One person acts to change his situation, the social world remains the same. The group acting together, in solidarity, changes the social order. The escape described by Richard Rashke in “Escape from Sobibor” describes a mass attack by the inmates of a Nazi death camp on the local social order, accompanied by a mass break-out. Most of the World War II prisoner-of-war escape narratives involve valiant individuals and small groups attempting social mobility from incarcerated to free that leave the social order of the camps the same.

There is also a rotation of elites process, as in the shifting prospects of political parties, where the minority becomes the majority and vice versa. There is a large change in the power relationships of cadre groups that leaves the governing social-political order unchanged. The metaphor of guard and prisoner can be stretched to cover political ins and outs Without a political democratic tradition in place the difference of the two sides can be onerous.

Within a formal prison system it can be difficult and dangerous to try for the social mobility of escape. That is why we can empathize with someone like Worker who has actively waved adios and left. We have all been there and wanted to do that. We live with our willfulness in check. Some under a heavier regime, but whether chained to the mountain like Prometheus or restricted to an all protein diet, the experience itself is not alien.

Passivity is the easier and safer way. Wait and hope for the third-party rescuer, the good Samaritan, the benign governor. The initiative to step outward lies elsewhere. with someone whose attention may be diverted or never engaged. It is even possible that a Mr. Do Good could snatch a humble citizen from a place of happy tranquility.

So escape implies a large and complex level of experience. At its center is the notion of a person or group being forced to acquiesce in the thwarting of active will, seemingly in an unalterable lock-down. The means can be physical or psychological (usually both); the agent can be a social order or a situation made and maintained by another or by the prisoner himself.

In the Second World War Pacific military campaigns cases of an isolated Japanese soldier separated from his unit who hides in the jungle and refuses capture for years after the war’s end are still part of human memory. This avoiding surrender is a form of escape–a not giving in–acted out again and again. A fugitive Abbie Hoffman on the run takes an audacious tour of FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. A fearful neurotic can, with insight into his own psychological dynamic, raise his head and throw off imposed psychological defenses and act directly for himself–an escape from alienation.

The person locked into a fat body longs to be thin. Two public personalities, professional comedians, Dick Gregory and Sid Caesar, who early in their careers were both plump and well padded though not excessively fat, came separately to the conclusion that this physical state was morally and medically dangerous and both changed life style and became very skinny. Gregory’s case is better documented–he radically changed his diet, gave up alcohol and partying, and took up long distant jogging. We can think of the situation as an imprisonment in a fat life-style and the change in diet and physical regime as an escape–a willful action against an oppressive habit. The price: a loss, or at least a diminution, of the original comic genius. Neither man exhibited, in my opinion, the highest level of his talent after the change.

It is within the prison that the physical manifestation of the process is most stark. The victim is under lock and key, guarded, surrounded by wall, moat, barbed or razor wire. In the most depressing form, bound, chained, gagged, blindfolded, strait-jacketed, hanging by the heels from the hook in the ceiling. Only the trickster magician Houdini could possibly get away. But this is the visible shadow of the subjective despair of the guilty miscreant in the coils of the historically stereotypical Mexican or Turkish jail, especially for dealers in dope. “Give up all hope” on one side, “hope springs eternal” on the other.

There is a mental hurdle that must be jumped that separates the actives from the passives. The known scene, where the present however horrible contains continuing life, against the final throw of the dice–up or down, liberty or death. The traditional Mexican informal execution turns on the ironic phrase “shot while trying to escape.” The chance for life on the outside turns on looking death in the face. Or perhaps escape is the act of a fool who acts with a clear, some might say empty, and uncluttered mind.

Of course the guards surrounded by the paraphernalia of laws, judges, negations and the super-ego with its associated cultural presumptions and the bully with supposedly superior strength stand tall for continued incarceration. Without the wall, the fence, the moat, the cell or the tree (as in up a tree or up a creek) there is no need to jump. And these blocks have their reasons. The escape threatens the status quo. Every successful escape is debited against the conserving minions, or at least the most vulnerable among them.

In 1946 the 553 Military Police Escort Guard Company of the U.S. Army in occupied Germany was in charge of the 7th Army stockade, then located in the specially requisitioned run-down and rat infested Mannheim City Jail. Broken glass was studded into the concrete top edge of the thirty-foot high enclosing walls. The front gate was always fully manned. Two armed guards patrolled the yards around the prisoner’s lock-up building. An unarmed turnkey walked the stairwell that lead to the locked gate on each of the building’s three floors behind which the prisoners spent their nights. The prisoners were American Army soldiers–the basic variety of felons who nag at the rest of us, through war and peace, good times and bad, rain or shine–now ticked out as deserters, thieves, murders, rapists and assorted what-have-yous. Things looked as tidy and tight as a constipated sphincter. And yet the shit came out in two large dumps of about ten absconders each and at least one singular dribble. In one escape a guard was kidnapped and held under threat of death. In another a bunch of prisoner-cooks, using the cover of preparing breakfast, build a wooden ladder and climbed the wall and slid down the other side along a long fire hose. The single escape was from the prison ward in the local Army hospital. The man in for treatment for gonorrhea skipped before the end of his medication regime. After each successful attempt enlisted guards and their non-commissioned officers were selected for punishment, mild enough with simple loss of earned rank but with no logical connection to actual responsibility. In one case a guard was temporarily locked in with the prisoners who he, a second before, had had under his armed control The holding clamp has its reasons.

Anyhow there is an imputation of evil or at least guilt. How else to explain the lock-down? Why would sensible human beings be in such an insane on-its-face situation. Energy expended on one side to hold down another. In a sensible world wouldn’t we all be out fishing or gathering berries? Yes, I know that prison can be thought of as a humane substitution for summary execution The supposed criminal is a major inconvenience for the rest of us. He is a bad example; he breaks the moral code. He seeks short cuts instead of taking the established road the rest of us travel. He is selfish, dangerous, and disruptive. He is the human approximation of the wild animal. If he is free, the rest of us are in misery.

And let’s not forget the group sitting on group situation. Classic case: the ancient Egyptians enslaving the Israelites to build the pyramids and assorted antiquities. After a lot of travail and Moses changing sides and with the intervention of a strong third party the gang gets away and eludes the posse, and then wanders the desert for a few generations. And on from there: Africans kidnapped and brought to the Americas. Brits transported to the uttermost southern seas. American Indians and Bantus enclosed in reservations. Sweat-shop workers. Stoop labor on farm and plantation. The lock-down has an economic as well as a moral edge.

So what is the sociological abstract model for escape? There is a holding, restricting pattern made up, in variable combinations, of people, laws, rules, cultural negations, moral prohibitions. A social pattern containing the power and will to limit the other. It is the unit act with ego (person or group) imposing a restraint on alter (person or group) who though under lock retains a willfulness and the theoretical capacity to act within, or in the process of discovering, an alternative and contrary social order.

Any social change contains the elements of, and can be described as, an escape.

I’m out-of-here.

^^^^^

Another American youth, Billy Hayes, was busted for transporting drugs in Turkey and jailed. He also escaped. His story is related in an autobiography titled “Midnight Express” that was made into a movie of the same title starring Brad Davis. Worker’s book was also made into a movie, “Escape.” starring Timothy Bottom.

A web site chronicling Japanese Army World War II holdouts… http://www.wanpela.com/holdouts/index.html