Away They Go!

So many criminals have been taking a powder from British jails these days (399 this year) that two months ago, when Soviet Spy George Blake sawed his way out of Wormwood Scrubbs in London, the issue of prison security welled up into a national scandal that acutely embarrassed the Labor government. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins reacted by naming the eminent Earl Mountbatten to head a committee of inquiry. In turn, the onetime First Lord of the Admiralty pledged his word that "We will be out working all the time, not sitting on our backsides."

He had no easy task. For the most part, British prisons were built in Victorian times, when a prisoner was locked in his cell all day and even ate his meals in it. Thus the jails are ill prepared for today's more relaxed approach, in which inmates gather in rooms converted for cafeterias, craft shops and TV. Under such conditions, surveillance is not easy and escape routes are more numerous. These days, prisoners approaching the end of their terms are generally trusted on work details outside the prison walls. There simply are not enough guards to keep an eye on everyone.

Mouths Agape. As promised, the Mountbatten committee went right to work, toured the biggest prisons and interviewed inmates as well as guards and wardens. It also studied a flood of recommendations from the public. One man proposed hollow cell bars filled under pressure with dye so that anyone trying to saw through them is sprayed an incriminating color. While it gave short shrift to such blue-sky schemes, the committee did suggest that Wormwood Scrubbs use closed-circuit television and more searchlights for better prisoner surveillance. The equipment was installed within a matter of days.

Last week, as the committee readied a final report from hundreds of pages of testimony, the difficulty of its task was doubly clear. While in conference with 104 of Britain's top prison officials at the Civil Defense Staff College in Berkshire, an unexpected phone call came for Governor Peter Jones of Dartmoor prison. As his colleagues stood by with mouths agape, Jones heard the news that his toughest criminal, the so-called "mad axman of Broadmoor," was at that very moment legging it for freedom. Frank Mitchell, 37, a jail bully who once attacked an elderly couple with an ax, had simply walked away from a work party, darted across the moor and disappeared into the fog.

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