For about a year and a half in the early 1990's I was a volunteer visiting artist at Western Penitentiary - a maximum security prison in Pittsburgh. Most of the men I worked with were serving extremely long sentences. Some of them had already been in prison longer than I had been alive.

During this time I became aware of two men at the prison that had successfully escaped but were eventually caught. One of the men was pointed out to me by another inmate. Supposedly the escapee had actually painted a rock pattern on his prison uniform to camouflage himself while scaling the outer wall. This seemed outrageous but I didn't say anything. I asked the storyteller how he was caught. Apparently he was caught in a car with a woman. He was receiving oral sex when the cops shined a light in the car. He was taken back to Western Penitentiary.

The other escapee was a highly articulate inmate that I spoke to fairly often. Apparently he was out on the street for quite a while before being caught. We talked about how the world had changed during the time he had been locked up. The thing that struck him most while he was on the run was how much prices had risen at supermarkets. He recalled being particularly stunned that cereal was suddenly $3.50 a box. I think he had been incarcerated for about ten years before escaping. While he had surely seen newspapers and TV ads, it wasn't until he was on the street that the reality of inflation hit him.

Marc Fischer