
Anyone sentenced to a term of imprisonment should not be given any opportunity to use cunning or violence to escape and possibly commit new crimes. Although spectacular escapes have regularly hit the headlines in the past, the enormous progress made in video surveillance means that times have fundamentally changed. The homepage of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice states that there are 36 prisons in Bavaria. 28 of these have now been secured using state-of-the-art video sensor technology. Since this conversion programme began, the number of serious escape attempts has fallen to virtually zero. Similar experiences are reported from other federal states.