I decided to have a chat with my older brother. He has lived a very colourful life, to put it mildly. During the call, we started talking about Canadian Prisons, as one does.
I don’t know if other families do this. My family certain does. We pick a topic, and we talk it into the ground. And the topic for today was prison.
The talk meandered to the topic of prison escapes. A topic I have a passing interest in from a scholarly perspective… I love heist stories, and a breakout is basically a closed box heist. But my knowledge of breakouts is purely media-fed. I know of prisons only from television and movies, but I haven’t studied or visited one. But my brother has taken something of a deeper interest in these facilities, and so we discussed a hypothetical situation about how one might exit a prison earlier than is strictly… legal.
It was an interesting bit of mental exercise! Me, with my purely media-fueled perspective, and his opinion which is better researched and thought-out.
The take-away was basically that if you really needed to escape a prison early, you could… but a lot of things would have to go exactly right, and it’s better not to find yourself in that position in the first place.
That stated… I might start my next novel with the hero in a prison. The seed has been planted…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!