It used to be considered the duty of any self-respecting prison inmate to plot his escape. From organising a file in a cake to putting on a cunning disguise, the battle of wits between warder and prisoner is the stuff of folklore.

Unless, that is, you’re banged up at La Grange Prison, Kentucky. It seems that all you have to do there is, er, get your friends to send a fax. Timothy Rouse — assessed as highly dangerous — found himself being shown the open door after his associates went to a store and sent a decree supposedly from the state’s highest court and demanding his release. That it had no letterhead and contained awful spelling and grammatical errors did not arouse suspicion. Quite the opposite: misspelling, the facility’s director later commented, is common in court documents.

One can only feel for prisoners such as Robert Cole, who downed laxatives to shed 2½ stone (16kg) and squeeze through a crack in the wall at Long Bay Jail in Sydney. That’s a hell of an effort when a spot of illiteracy will do just as well.

Still, it’s quite an achievement to make the legendarily hapless Mr Barrowclough in Porridge look like a master jailer. Let’s just hope that the staff at La Grange haven’t set their hearts on any employee-of-the-month awards.

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