The Chester County Jail has once again failed to keep the communities close by safe. Just recently the jail had another mishap with a prisoner escaping their facility. Danelo Cavalcante managed to flee by crab walking up the walls, jumping over the fence and reaching outside. Coincidentally, one of the other two people who attempted to escape during 2019 and 2023, Igor Bolte, also used the crab walking method. The only difference was that somebody had reported Igor. In the video that the Chester County Jail released, another inmate is seen to be standing by avoiding eye contact with Cavalcante. Additionally, the tower guard had previously been inspected and later fired because he did not relay information about the escape to his fellow coworkers.
It is ignorant for Chester County to solely blame the jail’s recent problems on being ”short staffed.” Prisoners are continuing to find easy ways to pass through the defective security system. The prison’s first course of action to prevent further issues should have been to add stronger additions.
The jail has blamed the fact that they are short staffed on not catching Danelo breaking out sooner, but two out of the three people who had escaped in recent years did so by climbing the walls in a similar spot. It seems as if the real issue is the security system and not having a solid, stable building. The security tape showed that the alarm eventually went off an hour after Danelo escaped. If they addressed the security problems sooner, the probability of prisoners escaping would be lower and less frequent. Countless of these mishaps could have been prevented early on.
Bearing in mind the fact that he was put in a county jail that only had one hundred seventy eight staff members taking care of the seven hundred twenty inmates, it must have been challenging to keep an eye on each inmate. It is astounding that the states around Pennsylvania were able to be prepared in such short notice and without anybody getting hurt. Appropriately some people are impressed by the efforts taken to find Danelo Cavalante.
Ariel Dori ‘27 said “I think it was handled very well. All bordering states were searching their entire area in five days and found him, so I think it was very effective since they found him in a short amount of time.” 65 of their free staff spots had not been filled causing extreme setbacks considering there was an increase of nearly 100 prisoners compared to past years.
Their claim for not having the proper amount of staff members on hand is not a sufficient explanation due to the faulty prison design. If the building was fortified, people would not be able to crawl through ceilings or find accessible and effortless ways out. Chester County Jail should have accepted the fact that it was their fault for letting multiple inmates escape in the same manner.
