A throwaway paragraph caught our eye in one of the dozens of stories about the killing of eight-year-old murder witness "BJ" Brown, and the arrest of suspect Adrian Peeler. Buried amid the outcries for a new, centralized state-level witness protection program lurked an interesting, and wholly ignored, piece of information: at the time of the killing Peeler was officially listed as escaped from a Department of Correction halfway house.
A three-month investigation that started with the DOC inmate database showed that the department routinely allowed prisoners to walk away from halfway houses and home release supervision long before their sentences were finished. By the time we wrote the story, nearly 15 percent of Connecticut's entire inmate population was listed as escaped. Another field in the database, "deadtime," contained the number of days not credited towards a prisoner's sentence because he had taken an unscheduled and unannounced leave of absence from the Department of Correction.
Not only did the "deadtime" field help us show that almost nobody is ever arrested for escape alone, but it also showed that hundreds of inmates since 1994 had escaped more than once.