American Notes Great Escapes

Officials at the Hays County Jail in San Marcos, Texas, should have been suspicious when inmates bought hundreds of yards of dental floss from the prison commissary. The inmates were not concerned with dental hygiene. They braided the floss into a rope that they fashioned into a ladder with stirrups made of fabric threaded through cardboard salt and pepper shakers. Using hacksaw blades smuggled into the prison in the soles of bathing slippers, the trio managed to saw through two of three Plexiglas panels in a window of their dorm cellblock.

After guards spotted the missing panes, the ladder was found under an inmate's mattress. Last week Arthur Harris Stier, 33; Ian James Holbs, 32; and David Gregory Surasky, 37, pleaded guilty to attempted escape. "It was ingenious," marvels Assistant U.S. Attorney Gerald Carruth. "That dental floss is strong. When it's braided, it's like nylon. If they had made it through the window and up the ladder, only a mesh screen stood between them and escape."