From the Rolling Stone article Sentenced to Death: Who's Responsible for the Murder of Neil Early? by Kathy Dobie :
July 30th, 2010. A warm, clear night with a deflated beach ball of a moon, and three men were slipping through the perimeter fence of Kingman prison in Golden Valley, Arizona. Behind them, the prison rang with the muffled shouts and clanging of thousands of caged men. Ahead, a pale strip of paved road and beyond that the shrub-spotted desert, silent and sentineled by tall cacti and coyotes. All of it, the desert, the prison, the three creeping men, encircled by mountain ranges that appeared as bluish smudges in the distance, like scrubbed chalk against the sky.
The privately operated, for-profit prison had opened for business six years earlier. Residents in the nearby town of Kingman rallied around the project after being told it would bring 300 jobs into their community and almost $700,000 in annual property taxes. What sealed the deal was the promise that the prison would house only DUI offenders – no rapists or murderers or armed robbers – just 1,400 intoxicated drivers with short sentences who would be given every chance at rehabilitation. In 2003, Dominion Correctional Services, out of Oklahoma, began construction on the 196-acre property. The company had speculatively purchased the land three years earlier, making a bet on a state known for having some of the most restrictive sentencing laws in the country and locking up a higher proportion of its people than all but three other states. ("Come on vacation, leave on probation" is an oft-repeated, unofficial state motto.)
As soon as 45-year-old Charles McCluskey was transferred to Kingman from a state prison, he'd started planning his escape. Security was such a joke, he later said, that he felt almost obligated to break out. McCluskey, brawny and slope-bellied, was serving three 15-year sentences for attempted murder and other crimes. His cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Mae Welch, had gotten hold of a couple of handguns, packed a getaway car with money and food, and thrown a pair of metal cutters over the fence. Now, she waited as each man made his way through the wire: McCluskey, along with Tracy Province, a 42-year-old serving a life sentence for murder and armed robbery, and 36-year-old Daniel Renwick, with two consecutive 22-year terms for two homicides.
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