A wheely bad idea – prisoner escapes in a bin!

A prisoner at the Alphen aan den Rijn penitentiary institution in the Netherlands recently found a creative way of attempting to attain his freedom. 

The man hatched an interesting plan to try to escape from the prison in late December 2023 which was by hiding in a wheelie bin! 

Unfortunately, and perhaps not surprisingly, his plan was not successful, he didn’t even make it out of the prison gates! However, employees at the incarceration centre did fail to notice his absence during multiple roll calls, only clocking that he was missing the following day, the penitentiary institution service DJI said in a report released on Monday, January 15 2024. 

According to other inmates, the prisoner was assisted by another inmate who helped him to hide himself inside the wheelie bin. The penitentiary is investigating how his absence went unnoticed during multiple cell rounds.

The DJI also reported two escapes by psychiatric prisoners while on unsupervised leave from the Dr. S. van Mesdag forensic psychiatric clinic in Groningen earlier on in the month of December 2023. Both were caught by authorities the following day. 

Someone also managed to smuggle a pen gun into the penitentiary institute in Leeuwarden, the DJI stated, as was discovered when prison workers found the pen gun in a rubbish container on December 6. The prison went on lockdown, and the police and prison staff searched the institution. They apparently found “no objects that could be associated with the pen gun.”